Proposal: Remove Semigroup and Monoid instances for Data.Map, Data.IntMap, Data.HashMap

[Oliver Charles]

On Wed, Feb 14, 2018 at 8:49 AM, Akio Takano <tkn.akio at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> I can think of 3 reasonable definitions for (<>) for lazy maps:
>
> 1. (<>) = union
> 2. (<>) = unionWith (<>)
> 3. (<>) = Strict.unionWith (<>)
>
> Of these, (1) is by far the most useful operation in my experience.
> (2) has the advantage that it seems like the most obvious choice, but
> it's not very useful in practice. (3) is slightly more useful than
> (2), but feels less canonical. Also (3) seems inconsistent with how
> fmap is defined.
>

I think you are very much in the minority here. (1) which we have now is
almost never what I want. (2) is much more likely to be what I need. And of
course, you can recover (1) with (2) by simply mapping First into every
element.

So there doesn't seem to be a clear winner. Perhaps there shouldn't
> have been a Monoid instance for maps in the first place. Given that we
> already have one, however, it seems that the marginal gain of removing
> it doesn't justify the cost of breaking code.
>

There should be a Monoid instance, and
http://conal.net/papers/type-class-morphisms/ argues that it should be (2).
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