David House wrote:
I've read through pretty much all your arguments, and I think they
boil down to this:
"I don't understand why X is useful, and therefore it can't be useful."
I meant to imply more that "it's very difficult to understand why it's
useful". If an extension were truely *useless*, I doubt those guys at
GHC would have bothered spending years implementing them.
Most of the documents that describe these things begin with "suppose we
have this extremely complicated and difficult to understand situation...
now, we want to do X, but the type system won't let us." Which makes it
seem like these extensions are only useful in extremely complicated and
rare situations. The fact that my own programs hardly ever result in
situations where I want to do X but the type system won't let me only
reinforces this idea. Maybe it's just the kind of code I write...
Moreover, if you've ever written a full-sized Haskell program you'd
probably find a use case for at least one of these extensions.
...or the fact that I only write trivial applications...
(Well, they're not trivial to me. But I imagine everybody else would
think them trivial.)
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