My first and biggest concern is simply that it's harder to read code which uses highly polymorphic functions unnecessarily.
You can see that even by considering plain-old fmap vs map: it's harder to read "fmap f . fmap g" than "map f . map g" because with the former you're having to manually search for more information about what Functor is being used in each case.
My second concern is that the more you overload, the more you risk having something unexpected happen:
Say we have two variables:
*Borders.Base.Utils> let a' = ["alice", "bob"] *Borders.Base.Utils> let a = (True, a')
we want to count the characters so we type:
*Borders.Base.Utils> length $ concat a
..but we've accidentally forgotten the prime character...
... right now we get:
:6:17: Couldn't match expected type ‘[[a0]]’ with actual type ‘(Bool, [[Char]])’ In the first argument of ‘concat’, namely ‘a’ In the second argument of ‘($)’, namely ‘concat a’
so we fix it and get our desired result:
*Borders.Base.Utils> length $ concat a' 8
...but under the FTP proposals (where concat would become Data.Foldable.concat) we get:
*Borders.Base.Utils> length $ Data.Foldable.concat a 2
(because pairs are Foldable in their second argument).
This cannot be a good thing.
I believe that the more generalised functions of FTP should be opt-in (i.e. you should - as at present - need to import them explicitly).
