Different kind of votings (Re: Taking a step back)

[Gershom B]

On November 6, 2015 at 10:49:14 PM, wren romano (wren at community.haskell.org) wrote:
> Hi all,
>  
>  
> The real problem is the growing divide in the community between the
> "liberals" vs the "conservatives". We could define these groups as
> those who're willing to break things vs want more stability, or as
> those who embrace polymorphism vs those who want to minimize mental
> type inference, or a few other ways I'm sure. How exactly we define
> the groups doesn't much matter imo; the point is: there are two groups
> which are growing ever more divergent from one another. 

I think that a “two groups” model of the disputes we’ve had lately simplifies too much, and in fact runs the risk of tending to force a bunch of varying motives and concerns into only two buckets, which I worry will increase the contentiousness of discussions rather help to moderate things.

Valuing stability for teaching purposes is very different than valuing stability from the standpoint of a library maintainer, for example. And valuing monomorphic definitions of some things is not the same as valuing monomorphic definitions of other things — or opposing design compromises made in the name of performance, etc.

The FTP, while a step forward in many ways, made compromises that opened it up to criticism from many standpoints — from the correctness standpoint it did strange things to the List module — from the backwards compatibility standpoint it did not provide perfect backwards compat (especially with warnings taken into account) — from the performance standpoint it turns out to have introduced at least one unanticipated regression. So no matter your concern, there is somewhere where it did not hit all the marks perfectly. However, this is for the most part because it sought to _mainly_ cover all those marks — so there is a _decent_ correctness story, and a _decent_ backwards compat story, and a _pretty good_ performance story, etc. But by that token, I hesitate to lump those who had concerns or opposition around the FTP into any particular camp.

What I think we can try to ask from people is that they evaluate each proposal, to the extent possible, on _its own merits_ and not as part of any camp they might imagine they are in regarding a long term alignment over “fast” or “slow” or “no” library evolution, or the like.

Even if we can’t get 100% consensus (and of course we won’t be able to), a continuing dialog where everyone tries to hear everyone else’s concerns and we try to make sure everyone is comfortable with the direction forward should still be the _goal_. Ideally, we will have less voting and not more, because ideally proposals that we move forward with will have a wide base of support across the board. In my mind, the way to do that is to treat each new library proposal case-by-case and go in willing to hear all sides, rather than prejudging what people’s take may be, why they might have such a take, etc.

Cheers,
Gershom