foldable flexible bridges (putting foldable+traversable in prelude) Re: Burning bridges

[Casey McCann]

On Tue, May 21, 2013 at 6:22 AM, Henning Thielemann
<lemming at henning-thielemann.de> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 21 May 2013, Carter Schonwald wrote:
>
>> 2) does the change make learning the language more challenging? No. In
>> fact, i've encountered *many* more
>> smart people getting confused as to why the map / fold etc in prelude are
>> all list specific than i've seen
>> people struggle with type classes.
>
>
> The Haskell beginners I know, even have problems with 'map' and even more
> 'fold' being higher order functions.

Notwithstanding that anyone having trouble with a monomorphic foldr is
unlikely to be significantly worse off with the Data.Foldable version,
and notwithstanding also that I've seen redundant monomorphic
functions create more confusion than they seem to avoid, the base
objection here is and always has been misguided at best.

Being a beginner is by definition an ephemeral state; the entire
purpose of being a beginner is to eventually stop being one. Don't
design a language (or anything else) around the needs of beginners
unless you intend that only beginners will use it, in which case one
wonders why they're even bothering.

- C.