There are a few misconceptions and dubious claims here. I don’t intend to watch the video after Jaro’s review, but this is my response to the claims in the post:
Haskell has a good reputation as a committee language, not a bad one. I have never seen “committee language” “hurled” at Haskell as an insult. On the contrary, many point to Haskell as a successful example of “design by committee”:
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Real World Haskell: “Many people are rightfully suspicious of ‘design by committee,’ but the output of the Haskell committee is a beautiful example of the best work a committee can do.”
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Rabkin & Katz, Socio-PLT: “Committees sometimes produce good designs – indeed, the designs of Algol-60 and Haskell are routinely lauded.”
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Hacker News: “Haskell was a success story of design by committee.”
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/r/haskell: “Design by Committee: I often hear that Haskell is an exception to the rule.”
It’s not true that new extensions are “mostly syntactic in nature”. Here are some recent ones that have a purpose significantly beyond their syntax:
ExplicitLevelImportsImplicitStagePersistenceNamedDefaultsRequiredTypeArgumentsTypeAbstractionsTypeDataDeepSubsumption
The Haskell Foundation (HF) has nothing to do per se with the design of the language. The GHC steering committee is responsible for the language as implemented by GHC, which is de facto the language “standard”.
It’s not fair to say that we “bend over backwards to an insane degree” to maintain backwards compatibility. In fact, going back just a few years ago shows how bad the instability problem was. Today we take stability more seriously, and that’s a good thing.
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Moritz Angermann: “I fail to understand how we can require code level migration for each release.”
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Julian Ospald: “This difference is very stark and should serve as a reference point when discussing diverging goals in our community.”
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Andrew Lelechenko: “Things however change when you are at the receiving end. At some point it does not matter how well motivated was the change or how many papers and committees support it. Enough is enough.”
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Moritz Angermann: “continuously breaking the compiler causes massive costs to users when upgrading for no obvious value other than ‘staying current’”.
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Enes Bayram: “these packages resist GHC upgrades due to very minor problems.”
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Julian Ospald: “9.6 has some pretty severe breakages”.
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Haskell Foundation Stability Working Group: “there is a real appetite for movement from practitioners on some notion of stability.”
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State of Haskell Survey 2022: 35% (360 respondents) said upgrading their Haskell compiler had broken their code in the previous year.
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Simon Peyton Jones: industrial users “complain, quite legitimately actually, that things change too fast and that we just broken their code again and it’s too much work for them to fix.”