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

[John Lato]

I agree with Mark and wren; it would be better to fix several of these
issues at once.  I think it would be helpful to know how frequently
community members would tolerate breaking changes like this.  For myself, I
think 2-4 years seems right, with 2 on the fast side.  My impression is
there's a lot of support for rolling breakages, but maybe that's not the
case?


On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 7:45 AM, wren ng thornton <wren at freegeek.org> wrote:

> 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
>
>
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