I suggest you come to https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/ if you'd like more discussion about it. We often have threads wishing for partial functions to be removed from base!
it won't let me know how or if the function you wrote will throw an exception, or what kind of exception it will throw, unless it's documented in the type.
but my objection is that many times, the possibly of failure is only present in my generic, language/api agnostic knowledge that a file might not be readable or a ship might drop an anchor on a cable. having thought about it, I then have to read the source code to understand what exception might get thrown, so I can prevent my program from crashing.
(i would prefer it to continue as best as it can in the case that some api is unavailable, which is obviously a usecase dependent decision)
firstly, the most available `head` function crashes on half the constructors.
more fundamentally, just try using any file or network io method. you just won't have a clue how it can fail, because it isn't even documented.
there's many methods where the best you can do is work out what exception is being used to wrap a C errno and read the appropriate Linux man page.
at least C documents it's functions that can return errors, and usually encodes them in the type. in Haskell, it's just, "if you're dumb enough to use IO (and what alternative have you got), anything can crash all the time. deal with it".
Haskell is great right up to that point, but that's a critical point.
(I've tried to find ways to deal with this, but the most people seen to refer too something else when discussing how horrible exceptions are, so I wonder if I'm insane)