Proposal: Add singleton function to Data.List module

[Simon Peyton Jones]

Once you’ve done that reframe, you can notice that there’s a lack of understanding toward which the appropriate emotional stance is curiosity, not dismissiveness. A lot of people have clearly expressed in this thread that they would benefit from this function, and when you assert as fact that such benefit does not exist, you’re implicitly dismissing and devaluing their experience.
I strongly endorse Nathan’s point here.

I think that a lot of the dismissiveness/devaluing is entirely unintentional -- but that does not reduce its harmful effects.   Nathan does us a service by bringing it to consciousness.  As he says, we can do better than this.

I like the emphasis on curiosity.  The GHC Steering Committee has adopted guidelines<https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/GRC.rst> with similar vocabulary.

Simon

From: Libraries <libraries-bounces at haskell.org> On Behalf Of Nathan Bouscal
Sent: 21 August 2019 11:22
To: Haskell Libraries <libraries at haskell.org>
Subject: Re: Proposal: Add singleton function to Data.List module

Hi all,

I would strongly encourage anyone inclined to say things like “there's no benefit in having the function” to consider reframing the sentiment as “I wouldn’t benefit from having the function, and don’t understand the benefit others will gain.” Once you’ve done that reframe, you can notice that there’s a lack of understanding toward which the appropriate emotional stance is curiosity, not dismissiveness. A lot of people have clearly expressed in this thread that they would benefit from this function, and when you assert as fact that such benefit does not exist, you’re implicitly dismissing and devaluing their experience.

Independent of any technical merits or readability concerns per se, there is a signaling aspect to this discussion. Already this thread has been referenced many times on social media, and it’s sending a very loud signal: “we don’t want you here”. Not because of the content of the discussion, but because of its tone. I happen to think that Haskell is a fantastic language for beginners, and I’ve been watching in real time as potential learners are deciding it isn’t for them. I’ve also been seeing experienced Haskellers deciding it’s not worth it to participate in the libraries process. You can argue as much as you want that people are wrong to get that signal from this thread, that they’re misinterpreting the comments here, etc, but none of that changes the outcome. We can do better than this.


On the proposal itself: I’ve been writing Haskell for several years now and have founded a company that uses Haskell in production, so I’d like to think I’m at least a step or two beyond “beginner”, and yet I cannot recall the last time I saw (:[]) in my code or anyone else’s, and seeing it here caused me to double-take and take a moment to mentally parse it. If that’s the case for me, I’m sure it must be far worse for an actual beginner. Building things by composing primitives is good, but if anyone put this operator into my codebase I’d likely flag it in code review. Readability isn’t about whether it’s possible to read something, it’s about how easy it is to read, and for me this operator doesn’t pass that test. Personally I tend to use pure, but a monomorphic option would be better. I would happily change to using singleton if it becomes available, and am a +1 on the proposal for both List and NonEmpty.


Nathan
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