Burning bridges and Foldable nonsense

[Gabriel Gonzalez]

>
> 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.
>    

I disagree.  Many of these changes have perfectly fine incremental 
solutions.  Moreover, none of these issues are actually impediments to 
building real-world Haskell code.  I'm not going to sabotage the future 
of the Haskell language just so that I can play golf with my import list.

Everybody here is making way too big of a deal over things that are very 
minor issues to working Haskell programmers.  The reason nobody has 
fixed these things is because they aren't really an impediment to 
Haskell programming.

This discussion has nothing to do with broadening our language's appeal 
to the larger programming community.  There are much more important 
issues that this community struggles with like deployment, mindshare, 
and tooling.  If we spent as much time recruiting new programmers as we 
did arguing over all this Foldable/Traversable stuff we wouldn't have 
these problems in the first place.

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