HP 2012.4.0.0 -- Call for Proposals

[Ian Lynagh]

On Tue, Aug 28, 2012 at 08:58:15PM +0100, Roman Leshchinskiy wrote:
> On 28/08/2012, at 10:26, Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:
> 
> > Geoff, Simon M, and I have just realised that
> > ·         vector (which we would like to be included in HP) depends on primitive
> > ·         And primitive is a Terrible Name for a package.  Really unacceptably bad.
> 
> Hmm, I'm not sure I agree :-)
> 
> Could you please explain why it's so terrible?

I can't speak for Simon, but I've always thought it overly-generic.

Given the description starts "This package provides wrappers for
primitive array operations from GHC.Prim." and that it was (AIUI)
created as a base upon which to build 'vector', I would suggest that
one of
    array-primitive
    primitive-array
    vector-primitive
    primitive-vector
would be a better name. I don't know enough about it to know whether
'array' or 'primitive' would be better, and I don't know if there is
precedent for whether 'primitive' should come first or last.

> I'm not really sure why it is worse than, say, binary. Or vector, for
> that matter.

Hopefully, binary and vector are the obvious, natural APIs for their
tasks.

If vector only supported vectors or Ints, for example, then I think that
it ought to be renamed int-vector. But seeing as it has a "Vector a"
type, and offers the expected functions such as
    map :: (a -> b) -> Vector a -> Vector b
the name appears appropriate to me (at least, based on a very cursory
look).

> In any case, if a lot of people really want to rename it I'd be ok with that provided I like the new name but frankly, I don't really see the point. The package is 3 years old and this is the first time anybody has complained about the name.

No-one asked me before  :-)

Actually, I did suggest having admins approve new package names when
Hackage was first created, but the people doing the work didn't think it
would be a problem. And to be fair, the handful of times I know of a
naming issue being raised, I think the maintainer has been happy (or
at least willing) to rename.

> If it is to be renamed, though, then I would really find it useful to
> have agreed upon guidelines on what constitutes a Terrible Name so
> that I can try to avoid picking one in the future.

It would very much have to be a guideline as opposed to a rule, but I'd
suggest something like:

    A package should not use a descriptive name that another package
    might be equally- or more-deserving-of.


Thanks
Ian