Quo vadis?

[Philippa Cowderoy]

On 05/10/2018 18:05, Simon Peyton Jones via Haskell-prime wrote:
> If we want to change that, the first thing is to build a case that greater standardisation is not just an "abstract good" that we all subscribe to, but something whose lack is holding us back.

To pick an example, I'm left wondering if we can achieve a minimal GADT 
specification that doesn't have to stay too stable in the presence of 
extensions. Changes in its behaviour would need documenting though and 
documenting the behaviour of inference is notoriously difficult at present.

While I have some ideas about documenting inference, I remain as 
infamously low on energy as ever - I'm not up to trying it with 
Haskell2010, let alone GHC, and I wouldn't want to make a business case 
for someone else trying it yet! I think it's a problem that sooner or 
later standardised Haskell will need to address though: we're a long way 
past the "Hindley-Milner plus simple, well-behaved constraints that 
don't need annotations" approach that typeclasses helped push the limits 
of.