Haskell Foldable Wast

Thu Feb 18 12:32:52 UTC 2016

No, I disagree with Foldable the way it currently looks.

-----Original Message-----
From: Matthias Hörmann [mailto:mhoermann at gmail.com] 
Sent: 18 February 2016 12:27
To: Augustsson, Lennart
Cc: Henrik Nilsson; amindfv at gmail.com; Henning Thielemann; Haskell Libraries; Ryan Scott; johnw at newartisans.com
Subject: Re: Haskell Foldable Wast

> I'm afraid that ship has sailed.  And as the Haskell ship steams towards new glorious horizons, I'm afraid sanity and restraint were left on the shore.

> What's left now is to either stay with an older version of ghc or fork everything.
> Or embrace crazy, of course.

As opposed to the crazy of leaving an entire language or staying on old, unsupported versions because of one small piece (a single instance of a single typeclass) you disagree with?

On Thu, Feb 18, 2016 at 1:19 PM, Augustsson, Lennart <Lennart.Augustsson at sc.com> wrote:
> I'm afraid that ship has sailed.  And as the Haskell ship steams towards new glorious horizons, I'm afraid sanity and restraint were left on the shore.
>
> What's left now is to either stay with an older version of ghc or fork everything.
> Or embrace crazy, of course.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Libraries [mailto:libraries-bounces at haskell.org] On Behalf Of 
> Henrik Nilsson
> Sent: 18 February 2016 10:54
> To: amindfv at gmail.com; Henning Thielemann; Haskell Libraries; Ryan 
> Scott; johnw at newartisans.com
> Subject: Re: Haskell Foldable Wast
>
> Hi,
>
> John Wiegley wrote:
>
>  > I think the fact that toList (3,4) has a meaning that is not obvious  > to the layman is a teaching matter.
>
> Well, I would not characterise many of those who have raised concerns about this as "laymen".
>
> With a couple of decades of Haskell and CS teaching experience, and a couple more of general programming experience, I don't consider myself a layman either (and I hope that does not come across as arrogant).
>
> Yet, things like:
>
>  > length (1, 2) = 1
>  > fold ("foo", "bar") = "bar"
>  > toList (3,4) = [4]
>  > elem 1 (1,2) = False
>
> simply makes no sense to me whatsoever: neither intuitively, nor in terms of compelling practical use cases.
>
> And as to teaching this to a class: well, if we want to stop our students from considering Haskell as a serious programming language, I can see no better way than the above. Our students here would be in laughing fits throughout their degrees.
>
> I read (x,4), in a Foldable
>  > context, as an "annotated 4", and not as some kind of shorthand for a  > two-element collection.
>
> Personally, if I wanted to introduce annotated numbers, I'd introduce a new type to clearly convey that idea. Yes, a bit more to write, but the end result is code that conveys the ideas behind it in a clear manner. After all, code is (broadly) written once, but read many times.
>
> As to making tuples functor instances, that can only be done by arbitrarily imbuing one of the fields with a special status.
> I have to ask: Why? After all, taking pairs as an example, the
> *essence* of a pair is that there are two projection functions, one for each field.
>
> So, if I am now interested in applying a function to the fields, why should only one of the fields be granted that privilege?
> That's just not symmetrical and goes against the very idea of tuples.
>
> And whenever I have wanted to map on tuple fields (which I do from time to time), I most certainly want the ability to map on any field.
>
> As to tuples as instances of foldable: Why?  There isn't any structure to fold!
>
> By all means, if some care about making tuples be instances of functor 
> and foldable etc., put those instances in a separate module, thus 
> saving the rest of the (Haskell) world from the cognitive burden of 
> even beginning to make any useful sense of
>
>     length (1, 2) = 1
>
> And allowing us to spend valuable teaching time on aspects of Haskell that actually might persuade our students to take Haskell seriously.
>
> Best,
>
> /Henrik
>
> --
> Henrik Nilsson
> School of Computer Science
> The University of Nottingham
> nhn at cs.nott.ac.uk
>
>
>
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