I said: I thought that …, I could prod people to articulate the why
Because the impression I’m under is that the CLC does not have an articulated opinion on the matter, so is failing to give guidance where leadership is clearly needed. I have no clue what makes you think I’m seeing articulated opinions.
Those quotes from me you snipped are pretty close to links and observations. But in case you missed it …
And I see @Ericson2314 got there before me: “we get these massive threads”. And that was barely a third of the way through that thread. (Addit: And after plenty of discussion on the mailing list.) At the half way point the Committee decided/closed the issue. Then there were requests to re-open and more rounds of discussion – which came to no conclusion I can see.
So somebody thought it a good idea to have Principles that would guide future discussions. (yes please!) A thread of 63 comments so far. No conclusion I can see.
Guiding Principles are the sort of thing a Committee should be there for. The CLC’s Charter says there will be Controversial Decisions. (d’uh, well yes) And then … ?
Specifically where I came in on Decoupling base
from GHC wired-in, there’s 42 replies on the original thread (which went off track) and 108 on the newly-spawned attempt to corral it. I see no criteria for how the Committee might evaluate any proposal. I’d expect the criteria to derive from the general Principles guiding assessing impacts of breaking changes vs expected benefits.
I get it that Discourse isn’t under the aegis of CLC; and that the bulk of comments on those GitHub Issues are not from Committee members. If the CLC had some guiding Principles, they could shape the discussion to tone down apocalyptic language and sweeping unquantifiable claims (like @chreekat’s “blast radius for changes of any sort is decreased” – of any sort?).
There’s been mutterings about the design of base
all the time I’ve been following Haskell. I’ve seen (versions of) this wishlist plenty of times. Nearly every attempt at it has faltered – with the conspicuous exception of the bruising ‘FTP changes’.
@Ericson2314 is about to do what? Split out the GHC wired-in parts and their dependencies? Revive nomeata’s work from 2013? “Rip base
in two” along its natural fracture points?
I get the impression @Ericson2314 is not doing (whatever it is) for his own entertainment. It sounds like a lot of work. Whatever results, is the Committee just going refuse point blank – because it’s too controversial or causes too much breakage? If there is to be a benefits vs cost assessment, what are the metrics for benefits? As opposed to chreekat’s ineffable claims.
Your interventions in these threads have generally been at the ultra-conservative (small-c) end:
It’s difficult to imagine slower than the pace of failing to make a decision about removing (/=)
from Eq
. For the sake of managing potential contributors’ expectations, what does “slower” mean? And is (whatever that means) the collective view of the Committee?