mtl for transformers-0.3

[Edward Kmett]

Since the overwhelming response from folks was 'push it!' i've uploaded mtl
2.1

-Edward

On Sun, Apr 8, 2012 at 4:29 AM, Edward Kmett <ekmett at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sun, Apr 8, 2012 at 3:46 AM, Roman Cheplyaka <roma at ro-che.info> wrote:
>
> Could you remind us what the difference between mtl and monads-fd is these
>> days? Is that described anywhere?
>
>
> In the beginning there was the MTL, and it was good.
>
> Eventually the fact that the MTL requires multiparameter type classes,
> flexible instances, and most gallingly, undecidable instances and yet was
> part of the Haskell platform started to bother some people.
>
> Other niggling problems with the MTL were starting to bother folks, so
> other MTL-like packages mmtl, monadLib, etc. started to form at this time.
>
> So Ross, who was maintaining the MTL at the time, wrote 'transformers',
> which provided a Haskell 98 core, and set about writing monads-fd and
> monads-tf fixing up some problems with the MTL as he went, and reducing
> code duplication (by making State s into just StateT s Identity rather than
> a separate type, for instance.)
>
> The general idea seemed to be that we could get the entire community to
> move over in one fell swoop to something much nicer and more maintainable
> that still felt mostly the same.
>
> With both monads-tf and monads-fd, I suppose the thought was that folks
> could use whichever version appealed to them the most.
>
> The problem was that -- in hindsight -- this choice was kind of an awkward
> idea, because monads-fd and monads-tf both use exactly the same module
> names! So when you write a library you are forced to choose one or the
> other and could not gracefully decide to supply both without turning to
> horrible package imports or making multiple packages crammed full of orphan
> instances, fragmenting the monad transformer library user base 3 ways,
> since not only did they conflict with each other, but they also conflicted
> with the original mtl, which by sheer inertia wasn't going anywhere any
> time soon.
>
> But, nobody wanted to maintain the stinking carcass that was the old MTL
> by this point. The core Haskell 98 transformers package was a pretty nice
> improvement though, and it was clear that the monads-fd approach was a
> nicer overall design and where all the improvements were being investigated.
>
> To deal with this fragmentation, ultimately, it was decided somewhere
> around the end of 2010 to rename monads-fd to mtl 2.0, and keep it built on
> transformers. So effectively, the MTL _is_ what became of monads-fd.
>
> Note: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/monads-fd redirects you to mtl.
>
> In the meantime, monads-tf was pretty much abandoned. It may have been
> perfectly reasonable to maintain separately, but it IS a lot of boilerplate
> to force on everyone who wants decent library support, and it really would
> need to be have a separate set of module names to able to coexist with the
> MTL in usable fashion.
>
> *TL;DR* monads-fd became mtl 2.0 back in 2010.
>
> -Edward
>
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