[Haskell-cafe] Infrastructure for testing the impact of a Functor/Applicative/Monad hierarchy

[Niklas Hambüchen]

Reading the other thread (Adding Applicative/Functor instances to all
Monads in GHC) I was wondering if there was infrastructure for testing
what effect making the often-discussed Functor/Monad change would have:
How many packages on hackage would break etc.

I have read a few times that people have "compiled all of hackage" to
see the impact of whatever.

How do you do that?

Do you just run a loop around cabal install or have you built some more
advanced tools to visualize the results better or compile the packages
"from ground up", in order of their dependencies?

I'm interested in anything in this direction.

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[Stephen Tetley]

Has anyone surveyed the in-print textbooks, tutorials, or tried to
assess how much Haskell (H98, H2010, Glasgow Haskell?) is used in
teaching?

Having the wrong hierarchy is a minor annoyance to us members of the
cognoscenti, but a change outside a revision of the language standard
could leave a lot of beginners and the teaching material they rely on
stranded.

[Edward Kmett]

There is a chicken and the egg problem with this argument.

Historically Haskell' has only considered changes that have been actually implemented. 

I would encourage the language standard to follow suit, but we survived a similar autocratic minor change to Num with very little ecosystem disruption.

-Edward

[Emanuel Koczwara]

Hi,

Which library should I use for simple user interface? Should I use
opengl directly (through HOpenGL)? Or Gloss? Or something else?

I want to create small ui library from scratch in haskell.

Emanuel

[harry]

Niklas Hambüchen <mail <at> nh2.me> writes:

> Reading the other thread (Adding Applicative/Functor instances to all
> Monads in GHC) I was wondering if there was infrastructure for testing
> what effect making the often-discussed Functor/Monad change would have:
> How many packages on hackage would break etc.

Some patches for GHC/base are attached to
http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/4834. They're a couple of years
old, so they may not apply cleanly, but they might help you in assessing the
impact of such a change.

[Niklas Hambüchen]

Ian Lynagh just posted a link to the "hackager" program:

http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/HackageTesting

That seems to be pretty much what I was looking for.