That's not my experience. Most Haskellers are indeed good people, but quite a few "vocal" ones are extremely arrogant and intellectually dishonest. Let me give some examples that I've met recently:
- A Haskeller once said Haskell is just as easy as Go to learn. I mean, yeah, many moderately complex languages might be as complex as Haskell, but seriously, Go? It is designed to be as simple as possible. Hell, it even doesn't have generics, which is considered pretty essential in nowadays' statically typed languages. And this claim isn't an outcome of ignorance. He is the author of a very popular Haskell learning material.
- Another said: "Steep learning curve is an interesting expression, because what it actually means is that one is learning quickly." Ok, that's not my interpretation of "steep learning curve" of Haskell.
- "The average Java programmers are worse than the average Haskell programmers" thing. This sentiment even existed in one of the "how to spread Haskell to the industry" presentation. I'm pretty sure if Haskell does be accepted by the industry, it will have the exactly same dumb programmers using it. So, what's the point?
You must be lucky if you haven't met any of them in the Haskell community. Actually, their reputation outside of the community is quite terrible. This must be resolved if Haskell wants to succeed. (And yeah, please stop saying "avoid success at all cost". I know it can be interpreted as "avoid $ success at all cost", just stop it.)
All communities of significant size will have good and bad apples. The Haskell community is no exception. But in my experience most of the community are fantastically patient and helpful people.
This may indeed be true, but Haskell has nonetheless developed a reputation, and it's not a reputation that it shares with just any other community. The only comparison I can think of is Lisp in the '90s and early 2000's.
My suspicion is this: There are lots of ways to make people feel inferior, or at least make them feel like you think they're superior. Most of them are ones that people probably don't do on purpose. But when you do it, the person you do it to is going to think you're a smug jerk nonetheless. There are also a lot of people who are supremely self-confident and therefore largely immune to being made to feel inferior. Many of them have been like this all their lives, and are therefore oblivious to this social subtlety.
One easy social gaffe that doesn't get discussed much is having no sense of humility about your language's obtuse syntax. Yes, I know, it's a familiarity issue, all languages have obtuse syntax, etc. etc. Doesn't matter. What matters is, if your language's syntax is different enough from Java's or Pascal's then it's going to be widely perceived as being obtuse. And responding to that with anything along the lines of, "Huh, makes perfect sense to me," risks coming across as a smug jerk.
Using the M-word is another famously risky behavior. Ironically, at least in my experience using it is also actively harmful to any attempts to explain the underlying concept, because at this point that word is @$#@ loaded. You can take someone who is already implicitly comfortable with the concept and uses them all the time in practice, and reduce them to a confused heap just by mentioning the M-word. And at that point, any attempt to pursue your goals will also risk coming across as a smug jerk. No, trying to address this issue head-on by writing blog posts with titles like "You already understand. . ." does not help. It just makes you come across as a condescending smug jerk.
I once had the fortunate experience to spend a week at a hot spring in Japan with many of the top Haskell people. I have to say, they were quite polite, intelligent, open minded, and could drink more than I could.
But every language community has its toxic elements.
> I'm pretty sure if Haskell does be accepted by the industry, it will have the exactly same dumb programmers using it. So, what's the point?
That's a property of all niche languages. Yes, if they get mainstream, they'll lose it, but until then it makes for an easy way to bias in a good way the set of people you could hire for a position.
If we assume companies do not filter well their hires, or that filtering them is costly (a huge "if"), it becomes a competitive advantage. And, as most competitive advantages, if enough people use it, it goes away.
- A Haskeller once said Haskell is just as easy as Go to learn. I mean, yeah, many moderately complex languages might be as complex as Haskell, but seriously, Go? It is designed to be as simple as possible. Hell, it even doesn't have generics, which is considered pretty essential in nowadays' statically typed languages. And this claim isn't an outcome of ignorance. He is the author of a very popular Haskell learning material.
- Another said: "Steep learning curve is an interesting expression, because what it actually means is that one is learning quickly." Ok, that's not my interpretation of "steep learning curve" of Haskell.
- "The average Java programmers are worse than the average Haskell programmers" thing. This sentiment even existed in one of the "how to spread Haskell to the industry" presentation. I'm pretty sure if Haskell does be accepted by the industry, it will have the exactly same dumb programmers using it. So, what's the point?
You must be lucky if you haven't met any of them in the Haskell community. Actually, their reputation outside of the community is quite terrible. This must be resolved if Haskell wants to succeed. (And yeah, please stop saying "avoid success at all cost". I know it can be interpreted as "avoid $ success at all cost", just stop it.)