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Comment by neilparikh | Hacker News Reader

Could you clarify what you mean by elitist/pedantic? I've found the Haskell community to be fairly friendly, and very open to beginners (including when they ask basic questions).

I've mostly been on /r/haskell and Quora, and watched talks by Haskellers though, so maybe the community is different on other platforms.

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Well you got a point, indeed the actual community is really nice at a personal level, I was talking about the image of the language you get from advocates you see on random discussion boards and blogs posts, so my use of the term "community" was probably imprecise to say the least. And I remember having issues with documentation in general, there's usually a lot of academic jargon which is kinda unique to Haskell, monads is the obvious example but there's a lot of concepts that seem to be treated on a much higher level of abstraction that I think is actually needed to get things done, and I'm sure things improved since I last tried Haskell, but that's why I think Haskell is elitist and pedantic.

I'd say this thread is a perfect microcosm of it. In JavaScript, the general attitude is "you're right, this thing you're complaining about is kinda stupid, here's this tool to make it go away" versus "no, you're wrong, Haskell is great, STFU"

I don't think that's really true in the Haskell community. I've seen lots of self-criticism of Haskell on /r/haskell. Even SPJ himself is willing to admit that Haskell has design mistakes.

Some things Haskellers readily admit as issues with Haskell:

- the String type

- records

- laziness (more contentious, but many people agree that this might not have been the right choice)

- error messages

- the prelude

Essentially, my experience has been that Haskellers are willing to accept that Haskell is not perfect.

Indeed, the Haskell community is very self critical, much to its credit.

https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/3b498l/if_you_coul...

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