I tend to disagree. On the one hand, parts of the Haskell prelude are quite opinionated. String as a linked list? That's an impressive sort of FP purity: you c

I tend to disagree. On the one hand, parts of the Haskell prelude are quite opinionated. String as a linked list? That's an impressive sort of FP purity: you can write tail recursive functions, and there are people out there who find that thrilling. It's just horribly space and time inefficient. Other parts are just old. I've read that there the reason head throws an exception when applied to an empty list rather than a Maybe was because working with Maybes was much more painful when Haskell was first written. That's just ordinary backwards compatibility pain. Other parts just seem painful for no reason whatsoever. Lazy and Strict ByteStrings/Text are both named ByteString/Text. They just live in different namespaces, so when you see code that reads "Text -> a", the only way to distinguish it is to look at what's been imported. If you couldn't decide which was preferred, they should be "StrictText"/"LazyText" (and programmers would be free to import them as Text if they so desired). (Nevermind that Text, while essential, isn't actually part of the Prelude...).