[web-devel] Last call for comments: WAI 0.4

[Michael Snoyman]

On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 4:41 PM, Chris Smith <cdsmith at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 2011-03-30 at 17:25 +0300, Markus Läll wrote:
>> I think it's more of a readability thing, than replacing symbols for
>> fun.
>
> It's certainly, at best, an odd choice.  Given the tools we have today,
> it is something that every indirect user of the library needs to worry
> about.  It also drastically reduces the number of people who might
> contribute to the code, to those who have either memorized unicode code
> points or set up editor macros for characters that aren't on any
> keyboard I'm aware of.  In return, you get... what?  The ordinary
> Haskell names for things will still be around anyway, so now you just
> have to recognize two names for the same thing, one of which you may not
> even know how to type, and know that they mean the same thing.
>
> That said, I'm not in the WAI user pool, so this doesn't affect me in
> the short term.  I'm just an interested observer.  And while I hope that
> after another year or two of experience we might all end up using some
> common code that plays a role similar to WAI, a dependency on this
> package is nowhere close to the biggest obstacle to overcome to reach
> that point.

Out of curiosity... what *is* the biggest obstacle to overcome?

Michael