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Comment by tome | Hacker News Reader

Sorry you've experienced this obnoxious behaviour. I've been in the community for years and never seen it. Maybe I'm not hanging out in the same places as you or I have some sort of unconscious bias that means I don't notice it.

Could you link me to an example? I have some measure of authority in the community and would like to help decrease the amount of obnoxiousness but I can't unless I know where it happens.

> Dear Haskell people: Get over yourselves. Do not mistake the larger software community’s disinterest in your pet language for their inability to use it. That’s simply not the case. If people had to use it even ‘lowly js devs’ would master it.

This is really interesting because the Haskell community I hang out with (mostly on Reddit) would love it if "lowly js devs" would master it. In fact we all too often get told by non-Haskellers that "Haskell will never succeed because it's too hard for most programmers to learn"!

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Well, what about this article? It claims I just have to understand 4 basic concepts to replace java, python and Ruby.

Great, so using those simple properties let's reimplement Eclipse. Let me use tensor flow. Replace my Ruby on rail website.

FWIW, Haskell/Yesod has replaced all my Ruby on Rails websites.

But, can you do that with a tiny boring fragment of haskell, as described in the article?

Yes. All of the Haskell we write for our business is boring. More here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21145872

While I'm happy you are having success and enjoying Haskell, I feel in the context of this article (you can have success in Haskell with a small easy fragment of the language), the use of the "Lens" package means you can no longer claim to be writing easy simple Haskell, unless you are using it in some way I'm unfamiliar with :)

I can see how (certain interpretations of) it could be considered wrong. I'm failing to see condescension.

The condescension is the authors assumption that this is right, and a tiny fraction of haskell can replace all uses of other major programming languages.

This to me (as a non haskell user) implies other languages can't have anything interesting to offer, as they can be so trivially replaced. That is the type of attitude I see from haskell programmers.

I see. Interpretations of that particular passage range from all the way from trivially true (Turing completeness) to trivially false (I can't build anything that uses Ruby on Rails in Haskell). Certainly there are some intermediate interpretations, like the one you suggest, by which it is condescending.

I replaced Rails with PostgREST, which is written in Haskell but for me as a user is just a binary that I run in front of my database, so now I don’t have to write any backend code at all.

Good enough for you?

I think that the obnoxious smugness is felt by those outside the community, not by those within it. This could be because the community is nicer to those inside, or because those outside perceive smugness where those inside do not. (I make no claim as to whether that is the fault of those inside, or those outside.)

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