Approachability

As this library evolves, we are placing a lot of emphasis on trying to make decisions which will help keep this library approachable for people new to the concepts in this library. We are collecting anecdotes from successes and failures we have experienced in the past in trying to teach others about these concepts, and trying to make decisions which will help ease the process of getting acquainted to the library for a newcomer. If you have any feedback for us in this regard, we would love to hear from you. See the Contributing page to find out ways to give us feedback.

Modularity

We are trying to make the library modular. It will have a tight core which will contain only the type classes, the bare minimum of data structures that are needed to support them, and type class instances for those data structures and standard library types.

Documentation

We feel that having lots of documentation is a very important goal for our project. It will be a big win towards our goal of approachability. We will strive to have the code well documented, we will strive to have lots of documentation external to the code, and we will strive to have a large corpus of compiler verified examples of how the software can be used.

Writing documentation is a huge part of developing software, and one that is often neglected. It is also a very easy way to get started with contributing to the project.

Efficiency

Although unfortunately there are times when programming only with pure functions and writing efficient code in Scala can be at odds, we are attempting to do our best at keeping our library as efficient as we can without making unnecessary sacrifices of purity and usability. Where sacrifices have to be made, we will strive to make these obvious, and will keep them well documented.