[Haskell-cafe] MRP, 3-year-support-window, and the non-requirement of CPP

[Christopher Allen]

Do those participating in this thread think sentiments like this are
constructive or inclusive? Is this how we encourage participation from
newer members of the community?

Framing this debate in terms of a programming pecking order is
unprofessional. Many times, those higher in the ranks will prefer a more
conservative approach, as experienced surgeons once resisted the
introduction of the autoclave.

The problem isn't the change; it's what the change costs you. Provide data
and make your case. Talk about what it _costs_ you, show evidence for that
cost, and describe what would make the change acceptable. Do it without
talking down to a constructed "other" of the people who've neglected to
make the same status display you've injected into this conversation. That
could be valuable input to the discussion, so we would could weigh costs
and benefits as a community.

There _are_ costs associated with going ahead with MRP, especially for
those with large 1mm LOC industrial codebases. This is partly why I'm
lukewarm on the change, but I believe it needs to happen sooner or later
and waiting for more 1mm LOC codebases to be born isn't going to make it
any better. The suggestions that we consider the example of 2to3 I believe
have been more constructive, particularly since we have this lovely
language which lends itself so nicely to static analysis anyway.


On Tue, Oct 6, 2015 at 2:02 PM, Malcolm Wallace <malcolm.wallace at me.com>
wrote:

>
> On 6 Oct 2015, at 17:47, Herbert Valerio Riedel wrote:
>
> >
> >> The problem by discussions is that they are done between two groups with
> >> quite a difference in experience. On one hand you have people like
> Bryan,
> >> who have considerable contributions to the Haskell ecosystem and much
> >> experience in large scale software development (e.g. from Facebook). On
> the
> >> other hand you have people who don't. That's okay. We've all been at the
> >> latter group at some point of our career.
> > [...]
> >
> > At the risk of stating the obvious: I don't think it matters from which
> > group a given argument comes from as its validity doesn't depend on the
> > messenger.
>
> In that case, I think you are misunderstanding the relevance of Johan's
> argument here.  Let me try to phrase it differently.  Some people who can
> reasonably claim to have experience with million-line plus codebases are
> warning that this change is too disruptive, and makes maintenance harder
> than it ought to be.  On the other hand, of the people who say the change
> is not really disruptive, none of them have (yet?) made claims to have
> experience of the maintenance of extremely large-scale codebases.  The
> authority of the speaker does matter in technical arguments of this nature:
> people without the relevant experience are simply unqualified to make
> guesses about the impact.
>
> Regards,
>     Malcolm
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>



-- 
Chris Allen
Currently working on http://haskellbook.com
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