12 ms·
> The arguments against revamping basically boil down to "but that would obsolete this old textbook!" The biggest argument against revamping is breaking tons o
by Guvante 11y ago
> The arguments against revamping basically boil down to "but that would obsolete this old textbook!"
The biggest argument against revamping is breaking tons of existing code. Haskell has been trying to gain traction in industry and randomly breaking existing code is a good way to have people lose faith. Now they have locked themselves into roughly "no breaking changes for three years after initial release".
Luckily there has recently been some more progress caused by realizing that online repositories are a great way to validate how much of a breaking change would happen with hypothetical changes, for instance removing the pure/return duality.
- pklausler 11y agoI'm not saying that the current Prelude should become unavailable. That would be really stupid.
- marcosdumay 11y agoPeople can (relatively) easily create a Haskell2016 standard with a new default Prelude, and keep the old Prelude by default on Haskell2010 code. Add a compiler switch to set it manually, and it's as trouble-free as it can be. It is great that Cabal pushes people to declare what version of the language they are using. I guess the reason it was still not done is because people do not agree on what the new Prelude should be, if should be a Prelude at all, or if it should be a single one.