I had a magical insight recently about something that was bugging me almost two years. The question was: why the hell was I so unproductive creating type classes!
So here is the deal: when you develop, you combine invariants and transformation properties of your different pieces to make something new. If you are someone like me, you live your code, and that means that the relations between the different concepts throughout the code drive me "emotionaly". Yesterday, it occured to me that what is special with type classes is that they are "open". They are open because their properties are not always obvious from the definitions. Worse, new type classes often have unambiguous properties.
I say open because by contrast if I avoid type classes by explictly defining type specific functions or if I create encapsulating types to replace the functional polymorphism by data variants, then I am in effect "closing" the design. With a "closed" design I have the whole design in my head and I "just know" what is best to do next. With an open design I find myself worrying about peripheral design issues which are mostly not so important, yet I still worry about then... and that really hurts my productivity.
I will therefore adopt a much stricter approach to creating new type classes. The basic rule is NOT to create new type clases. Yes, I love to think about them, but I can't afford to. Then, when I have mentally built all the invariants with the explicit function calls or encapsulating types, and more importantly when I have finished what I was orginally trying to do, I can imagine refactoring and bringing in new type classes.
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