Typeclassopedia -- a generic response
Thanks for all the fantastic feedback on the Typeclassopedia! Please keep it coming!
Such an outpouring of helpful comments and suggestions deserves a response, so I just wanted to write a quick note to say that I am reading every piece of feedback—whether here, on haskell-cafe, in #haskell, or on reddit—and fully intend to respond to each as appropriate. However, I probably won’t get around to it for a week or so, as at the moment I am focusing on digging myself out from all the other obligations that piled up while I was finishing the first draft. In the meantime, please keep sending me your suggestions!
However, there is one common suggestion I’ve received that I’d like to respond to now, which is that the Typeclassopedia should be put into wiki form. There are two main reasons I am submitting it for publication in the Monad.Reader, instead of creating it as a wiki in the first place:- There is something about the permanence and elegance of a finely typeset, well-edited publication that a collection of wiki pages cannot capture. This isn’t just an issue of presentation; it also affects the content: writing for the Monad.Reader means that my writing and presentation are better than if I had created pages on a wiki.
- The Monad.Reader has a deadline; creating a wiki does not. Without a deadline, I probably never would have finished.
With that said, I think wikifying it after publication is a fantastic idea, and I hope that someone will take the initiative to do this. The Monad.Reader publishes all the source for each issue under a BSD license, so I don’t think this should be a problem.