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It seems to me that the stewards and maintainers of the language actually _intend_ for Haskell to be friendly to research, experimentation and academic pursuit

It seems to me that the stewards and maintainers of the language actually _intend_ for Haskell to be friendly to research, experimentation and academic pursuit. That is fine, as far as it goes, but obviously this will, at some point, be at odds with the interests of programmers looking to use Haskell as a practical, stable tool. It sounds to me like what is needed is the ability to mark all the experimental, envelope-pushing bleeding edge stuff to a different track (whether through pragmas or even a package level declaration) so that programmers know just by looking at the package whether it's something they want to pull in. This would allow practically-minded developers to adopt a policy along the lines of "we only use Haskell stable" or whatever it'd be called. The dynamic I'm describing is the "Avoid success at all costs" phrase, right? The idea being that if Haskell adoption gets "too high" then the language will become inertial and be unable to continue pushing bleeding edge concepts. What I'm proposing is a way to allow that to happen but also maintain a separate track at the level of the language stewardship that formally acknowledges and recognizes that day-to-day programmers need some way to opt out of some of the edgier stuff and to stay within a more limited subset of stable Haskell.

BellsOnSunday 3y ago
There is the Simple Haskell initiative, which encourages what you're talking about, but no flag or pragma that says "this project uses simple Haskell". Obviously, simplicity is in the eye of the beholder. Fancy type features do have their use cases where they make types more expressive, the code safer and even simpler, so long as you've internalised how they work.
DonaldPShimoda 3y ago
> It seems to me that the stewards and maintainers of the language actually _intend_ for Haskell to be friendly to research, experimentation and academic pursuit. Yes, this is explicitly stated as a core principle in "A History of Haskell: Being Lazy with Class" (2007) (direct PDF link: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/history.pdf https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...).
mrkeen 3y ago
> That is fine, as far as it goes, but obviously this will, at some point, be at odds with the interests of programmers looking to use Haskell as a practical, stable tool. That's what Stackage is. Stackage provides consistent sets of Haskell packages, known to build together and pass their tests before becoming Stackage Nightly snapshots and LTS (Long Term Support) releases. [1] Java will never get this. [1] https://www.stackage.org/ https://www.stackage.org/

BellsOnSunday 3y ago

There is the Simple Haskell initiative, which encourages what you're talking about, but no flag or pragma that says "this project uses simple Haskell". Obviously, simplicity is in the eye of the beholder. Fancy type features do have their use cases where they make types more expressive, the code safer and even simpler, so long as you've internalised how they work.

DonaldPShimoda 3y ago

> It seems to me that the stewards and maintainers of the language actually _intend_ for Haskell to be friendly to research, experimentation and academic pursuit. Yes, this is explicitly stated as a core principle in "A History of Haskell: Being Lazy with Class" (2007) (direct PDF link: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/history.pdf https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...).

mrkeen 3y ago

> That is fine, as far as it goes, but obviously this will, at some point, be at odds with the interests of programmers looking to use Haskell as a practical, stable tool. That's what Stackage is. Stackage provides consistent sets of Haskell packages, known to build together and pass their tests before becoming Stackage Nightly snapshots and LTS (Long Term Support) releases. [1] Java will never get this. [1] https://www.stackage.org/ https://www.stackage.org/