Polymorphism in the Prelude

[Richard Eisenberg]

Forgive a perhaps newbie question, but: How do I use the haskell2010 package? An earlier recommendation in this thread for novices is to "use haskell2010" to reduce the upcoming extra polymorphism in the prelude. How is this done, in practice? My guess is that we have to use several command-line flags to hide the `base` package and make the `haskell2010` package visible. Some experimenting got `ghc -package haskell2010 -hide-package base Foo.hs` to work. These flags can't even be embedded in an OPTIONS_GHC pragma.

In any case, it's a bit of a hoop for novices to jump through, especially if they aren't being guided by a teacher.

I tend to agree that taxing the large quantity of experienced users for the benefit of novices is wrong-headed. But, I still think we need a nice, simple story to get new folks off the ground. Haskell prides itself on its beauty, and requiring several obscure and (at first) inscrutable command line flags to get decent error messages for a novice is not beautiful.

Richard

On Jun 17, 2014, at 7:58 AM, Edward Kmett <ekmett at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 3:59 AM, Greg Weber <greg at gregweber.info> wrote:
> 
> On Mon, Jun 16, 2014 at 10:33 AM, Edward Kmett <ekmett at gmail.com> wrote:
> Based on raw download stats:
> 
> basic-prelude has probably received the most traction. It has ~8k downloads.
> 
> classy-prelude decays to ~4k downloads.
> 
> general-prelude ~180.
> 
> The other two I mentioned have had ~100 each.
> 
> By way of comparison something like, say, 'profunctors' has ~50k downloads.
> 
> That is interesting, thank you for sharing! Are you using direct downlaods of profunctor? because profunctor is designed to be a library dependency (lens depends on it as do 20+ other packages), whereas with classy-prelude users are advised to not use it as a library dependency and only use it for their applications. There is only really one library with usage that depend on classy-prelude, classy-prelude-conduit, and only classy-prelude-yesod depends on that, and nothing depends on that, they are all designed for application writers, not as library dependencies.
> 
> Does it makes sense to make a direct comparison of total downloads for these 2 different use cases?
> 
> It isn't a perfect comparison, but if we're looking at adoption, adoption is adoption regardless of whether the library is sold for a very limited application-oriented usecase. Haskell is the sum of library authors and application authors (and students who will probably never write a library). All we're doing is bringing the non-controversial parts of base that people already use every day into the standard Prelude, where it can benefit each group. 
> 
> A proposal that says "well, application authors can just use X" ignores the large mass of library authors out there when it just doesn't have to. we have a straightforward path to monotonic improvement over the status quo, lets take it.
> 
> Again, my reaction is mostly measured by the fact that I've actively asked folks in person about this as I travel around to user groups and ask "what is it that the core library committee could do that would make Haskell better for you" and have received a lot of feedback, it isn't just driven by those numbers.
> 
> -Edward

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