Proposal: overhaul System.Process

[Frederik Eaton]

By the way, I don't mean to suggest that I would ever have the time or
motivation to do as much for Haskell as Simon has done, and clearly for the
same reason he has a better perspective than I. I am not even sure if there
are plans to ever remove the existing interfaces. I was just voicing a
concern that came to my mind when I saw this thread. If it is not possible
to address the concern, then I'm sorry for boring people with it. But it is
something that worries me on occasion.

Best wishes,

Frederik


Frederik Eaton wrote:
> 
> Dear Curt,
> 
> Well, I thought the exact same thing when I started using Haskell. Then I
> found that nothing I wrote lasted for more than a year or so. I would put
> a lot of time into a project, it would be done, and then soon it wouldn't
> compile anymore. So whereas with other languages I had to deal with less
> slick interfaces, but got code that is still useful to me, many of the
> things I wrote in Haskell are bit-rotted. This doesn't seem strictly
> necessary, for instance, I improved on the System.Process interface in my
> own libraries, and nobody had to change their code as a result. The
> problem is that when Simon Marlow improves on System.Process, everyone has
> to change their code. Why not release the new interface as a new library
> with a new name? Changing the standard is an easy way to point new users
> to whatever the current best interface is, but it is destructive as well,
> it defeats the purpose of "standard" by breaking old code. We could
> accomplish the same thing constructively with a web page that lists
> currently recommended libraries. Then, new users could use the new
> libraries, but code that depends on the old libraries would still work. I
> want to write code that lasts for a long time. I don't want everything I
> write to become a maintenance hassle, I have found that I don't have time
> for that. It seems strange that the Haskell language, being "pure",
> doesn't allow destructive updates of data; but the standard module
> interfaces are being constantly subject to destructive updates, i.e. names
> change meaning or disappear, which can make it just as hard to reason
> about what my code is doing.
> 
> Frederik
> 
> 
> Curt Sampson-2 wrote:
>> 
>> On 2008-05-25 16:27 -0700 (Sun), Frederik Eaton wrote:
>> 
>>> ...but updating it whenever the standard interface changed and broke
>>> my code. So I'd like to cast my vote for backwards compatibility. The
>>> standard libraries will never be perfect, but constantly deprecating
>>> and removing functionality can really impair their usefulness for
>>> large projects.
>> 
>> Just as a counterpoint, I have to say that one of the things that
>> impressed me a lot about Haskell over the last two months as I've
>> started using it for real work is that the library interfaces are of
>> noticably higher quality than other languages I've used (in the main, C,
>> Java and Ruby). Part of this may be due to having smarter people working
>> on things in the first place, but I suspect a reasonable amount is due
>> to the ability to change interfaces as one discovers how libraries
>> are really used and better ways to design them. I wouldn't want to
>> lose this, and end up with the kind of cruft that everybody knows is
>> broken but will never go away that exists in the Java and (to a lesser
>> degree) Ruby libraries. I'm willing to put up with a fair amount of
>> interface-change pain to this end.
>> 
>> cjs
>> -- 
>> Curt Sampson       <cjs at starling-software.com>        +81 90 7737 2974   
>> Mobile sites and software consulting: http://www.starling-software.com
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>> 
> 
> 

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