Haskellers are usually out to convince that Haskell is for most programmers, and that "need PhD to use it" is a myth.
It is people frustrated by the (difficult) learning curve of Haskell that say such things.
Partially it's a matter of taste.
I hated Haskell syntax in the first few weeks ("Why did they have to differ on this?!") but later I realized it's objectively nicer for expressing the things Haskell expresses and much prefer it.
Then there's a lot of bad tutorials out there.
And finally the tooling / IDEs aren't great for discovering the language and type system.
I don't see significant ways Haskell itself could be more geared towards humans than it already is. It brings simple mathematical concepts and abstractions to the forefront - and simple is not easy, but is worth it.
And there it is again. I haven't drank the Haskell kool-aid, so I must not be smart enough to use it properly.
> And here's the arrogant, self-important attitude that turned me off of Haskell. - jlarocco
> It is people frustrated by the (difficult) learning curve of Haskell that say such things. - peaker
> And there it is again. I haven't drank the Haskell kool-aid, so I must not be smart enough to use it properly.
Firstly, reading "people frustrated by the difficult learning curve of haskell say such things" as "I haven't drank the Haskell kool-aid, so I must not be smart enough to use it properly." is a very uncharitable interpretation.
Secondly, I believe solomatov and Peaker's comments could be written more unambiguously as follows (though I thought they were precise enough):
solamatov commment rewrite: Someone who can write Haskell might be a better programmer than programmers who use other languages because Haskell is difficult to learn.
peaker comment rewrite: People frustrated by the difficulty of the Haskell learning curve say things such as "Someone who managed to learn Haskell to the point they can write code in it have proven their worth more than those who use easier to learn languages"
So jlarocco, could you still call classify these comments and the thought processes behind them arrogant and self important? Is there anything that would turn you off of them?
When I learned Haskell I was frustrated by its difficult learning process until I stuck with it long enough, as did almost all who passed the learning curve.
How do you get any reference to "smart enough" out of this?
"persistent enough" is definitely relevant for learning Haskell, though.