[Haskell-cafe] Monad of no `return` Proposal (MRP): Moving `return` out of `Monad`

[Sven Panne]

2015-10-05 11:59 GMT+02:00 Simon Thompson <s.j.thompson at kent.ac.uk>:

> [...] It’s really interesting to have this discussion, which pulls in all
> sorts of well-made points about orthogonality, teaching, the evolution of
> the language and so on, but it simply goes to show that the process of
> evolving Haskell is profoundly broken. [...]
>

I wouldn't necessarily call the process "broken", but it's a bit annoying:
Because of the constant flux of minor changes in the language and the
libraries, I've reached the stage where I'm totally unable to tell if my
code will work for the whole GHC 7.x series. The only way I see is doing
heavy testing on Travis CI and littering the code with #ifdefs after
compilation failures. (BTW: Fun exercise: Try using (<>) and/or (<$>) in
conjunction with -Wall. Bonus points for keeping the #ifdefs centralized.
No clue how to do that...) This is less than satisfactory IMHO, and I would
really prefer some other mode for introducing such changes: Perhaps these
should be bundled and released e.g. every 2 years as Haskell2016,
Haskell2018, etc. This way some stuff which belongs together (AMP, FTP,
kicking out return, etc.) comes in slightly larger, but more sensible
chunks.

Don't get me wrong: Most of the proposed changes in itself are OK and
should be done, it's only the way they are introduced should be improved...
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