Proposal: add foldMapA to Data.Foldable or Control.Applicative

[David Feuer]

On Wed, May 8, 2019, 12:12 AM Bryan Richter <b at chreekat.net> wrote:

> Hi David,
>
> At the risk of invoking the gods of Language Blorp, I will note that as a
> working programmer I know exactly what Applicative, Traversable, and Monoid
> are (from Vanessa's original proposal), but the unfortunately-named getAp
> is something I will only learn about begrudgingly.
>

That seems unfortunate. Learning to use such types is pretty useful. I'd
recommend that every Haskell programmer get to know all the types in
Data.Monoid and come to an understanding of what they're good for.

>

> What you consider "so simple we don't need to define it" took a rather
> lengthy email to describe. Are you sure it's not worth actually defining?
>

So ... that long post was about trying to prove what I intuitively thought
*must* be true. In the end, I wasn't quite able to finish the proof, but I
did at least manage to convince myself that my intuition was correct. It's
true that this sort of intuition takes a certain amount of time to develop.
In the case of a really important operation, yeah, we should package it up.
But is this operation important enough? I'm not really convinced yet.


If nothing else, the next time someone searches Hoogle for a function
> matching its type signature, perhaps it will be an opportunity for someone
> like me to peer beneath the hood and learn something new.
>

That's valid. But ... there are lots of opportunities for that sort of
thing already. Is it worth the API clutter to add another one?
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