Burning bridges

[wren ng thornton]

On 5/19/13 7:25 PM, Anthony Cowley wrote:
> I think this issue may be too big to rely on mailing list +1s. Is there any precedent for having a web-based poll of some sort? We often get more engagement in debates on IRC and /r/haskell than the mailing list, so let's not let the choice of forum drive the result.

Indeed.

Personally, I'm all for blessing Foldable/Traversable as "built-in" and 
getting rid of the monomorphic legacy. But then, I'm also all for making 
Applicative a superclass of Monad, not having all the mtl modules 
re-export everything from Control.Monad, etc. However, all of these 
issues have a long history of discord, and that discord cannot be 
resolved on this list IMO.

I'm generally a staunch advocate of backward compatibility. However, 
these issues are ones where we've known the right answer for a long time 
(unlike refactoring the numeric type class hierarchy), and we've simply 
been unwilling to burn bridges in order to do the right thing. I love 
Haskell, and I respect the haskell' committee, but I think it's time to 
just burn it all down.

Let us not forget the original reasons for many of these warts. Some of 
them stem from ignorance or oversight (superclasses of Monad); others 
stem from the desire to help newcomers (monomorphism); and others stem 
from circularities in the language definition (the existence of the 
Prelude). As Haskell has developed, we have learned more ---therefore we 
should not embrace prior ignorance---, our standard idioms have evolved 
---therefore clinging to list-monomorphism *causes* confusion rather 
than alleviating it---, and we've tried to remove much of the 
circularity involved in desugaring the various built-in notations for 
lists, arithmetic sequences, do-notation, etc.

With all that has changed in the last 15 years, I think it's high time 
to fork Haskell, tear off all the bandaids, and begin afresh. This won't 
solve all the problems, of course. We will still despair of the numeric 
hierarchy; we will still despair of the partial functions demanded by 
the Haskell spec; we will still worry about how to resolve things like 
MPTCs, type families, and all that. But at least we can finally put 
these particular ghosts to rest. Alas, to fork the language is to split 
the community. And while I advocate such drastic measures, they are 
measures which cannot be resolved either on this list or by the 
(intentionally conservative) haskell' committee.

-- 
Live well,
~wren