[Haskell-cafe] Why the Prelude must die

[Sven Panne]

On Saturday 24 March 2007 03:48, Stefan O'Rear wrote:
> 1. Namespace pollution
>
> The Prelude uses many simple and obvious names.  Most programs don't
> use the whole Prelude, so names that aren't needed take up namespace
> with no benefit. [...]

Even though I think that the current Prelude is far from perfect, one should 
not forget that is a very solid foundation of a "common language": If one 
sees e.g. '(.)' or 'map', it is immediately clear to everybody what this 
means, without having to scan through (perhaps long) import lists. Of course 
one could hide some parts of the Prelude etc., but I think in the long run 
this only leads to confusion. Redefining common things, heavy use of tons of 
self-defined operators etc. all make maintenance much harder.

Try reading Lisp code with heavy use of macros or C++ code with tons of 
overloadings. This is more like Sudoku solving than anything else, because 
there is no "common language" between the author and the reader anymore.

And taking away the prelude is a little bit like taking 
away 'int', 'double', 'for', 'while' etc. from the C programmer...

> 11. Committeeism
>
> Because the Prelude has such a wide audience, a strong committee
> effect exists on any change to it.  This is the worst kind of
> committeeism, and impedes real progress while polluting the Prelude
> with little-used features such as fail in Monad (as opposed to
> MonadZero) and until.

Depending on your viewpoint, you can see this as a plus. Everybody agrees that 
finalizers are evil, but propose the removal of that method from 
java.lang.Object to the Java people. :-)

My proposal would be to incrementally improve the Prelude, modularize it a bit 
more, fix the Num hierarchy, but basically leave it as it is.

Cheers,
   S.