Functor => Applicative => Monad

[Stephen Tetley]

On 6 December 2010 21:57, Brandon S Allbery KF8NH <allbery at ece.cmu.edu> wrote:

> Agreeed.  Put more concretely, developers strongly prefer that ugly warts in
> the language be *fixed*, even at the expense of backward compatibility.
> Java, in particular, breaks things because a sufficient number of developers
> have asked that backward compatibility be discarded in favor of fixes.

I'm not surprised that developers want ugly warts fixed, my contention
is that developers have overlooked that this change [*] has a
different magnitude to themselves compared to educators / authors and
beginners.

[*] Personally I don't consider the status quo here to be an ugly
wart. The redundancy of notations between Applicative and Monad has
useful separation of Applicative and Monadic styles for *current*
Haskell. If Post-Haskell or even Haskell'2012 wants to merge the
styles to "bind only when you need to" that's fine but the new
language is obliged to create the tutorials, text books, write the
conference papers in the new style, etc.