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

[Malcolm Wallace]

On 6 Oct 2015, at 19:31, John Wiegley wrote:

> It must be stated, however, that some have
> become frustrated by the frozen state the Haskell language has entered. No
> substantial changes have occurred since 1998.

Haskell has de-facto undergone huge changes and additions since 1998.  The official language standard may not have kept pace, but a huge amount has happened in the last 17 years:  FFI, Cabal&Hackage, type families, just to pick the first three that come to mind.

No-one objects to these improvements.  The language and its ecosystem are not frozen.  What many people do object to is unnecessary and under-motivated breakage of existing code.  The "monad of no return" proposal promises no new semantic benefits, just a small conceptual tidy-up, but at a huge cost to the community at large.  It is of a completely different category to the substantial and useful changes that we are used to.

Regards,
   Malcolm