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

[wren ng thornton]

On 5/22/13 1:12 AM, Mark Lentczner wrote:
> 3) Stability is very important to adoption of a language. People are very
> influenced by their first impressions of a system. We seem perilously close
> to "death by continuous little paper cuts" here: I saw the catch debacle
> snag tons of people and projects in tiny hiccups. If you were a newcomer to
> Haskell (experienced engineer or no) and you ran into this, I bet it was a
> turn off.

FWIW, this is exactly why I made the "Burning Bridges" post. We've had a
number of rather serious papercuts of late. The Prelude.catch one was
rather annoying, especially because of its interaction with various
automatic tools. The Show =/=> Num one also caused a flurry of version
bumps and breakages. And of course there are others. These are all
base/core issues ---I'm completely ignoring things like mtl-1 vs mtl-2, or
parsec-2 vs parsec-3, or the iteratee libraries.

I am not opposed to change (obviously). I like that Haskell evolves. But
the slow trickle of major breaking changes is not so nice. Nor is the
accumulation of warts due to this slow tricking of major changes. This is
why I suggest aiming for a major breakage in order to fix as much as we
can in one fell swoop.

Yes, breakage will happen; but breakage is already happening with every
new version of GHC! We continually hide our heads in the sand and pretend
that this slow trickle of major changes isn't happening, but it is. And it
turns off both newcomers trying to get their footing on shifting sands, as
well as folks who want to deploy Haskell with the same sort of stability
as they get from deploying Perl, Python, or Ruby.

-- 
Live well,
~wren