I think OverloadedStrings makes things more ambiguous. It's a power-feature, to be sure, but it also makes the use of Text and ByteString much more available in

I think OverloadedStrings makes things more ambiguous. It's a power-feature, to be sure, but it also makes the use of Text and ByteString much more available in much the same way that numeric literals do (literally the same way, actually). I think that sort of ambiguity is part of Haskell. It rescinds a bit on the HM promise of never having to write types, but Haskell has long rescinded on that in spirit and practice. It leads to a bit of beginner trouble, but, again, not any more than numeric literals do. I welcome overloaded lists because I feel it'll make more libraries willing to expose Set-typed interfaces when that's the honest contract that should be upheld by the interface. That's what I want my types to tell me—not just what's syntactically convenient.