If you find a text in German and you don't understand a word, because you have never studied German, do you think you are too stupid to speak German?
This is sort of like PG's Blub paradox: the reader opens an article, sees a bunch of seemingly bizarre syntax and novel terminology, can't easily map it to something he/she knows from C/Java/Python/Javascript, and panics.
For some reason people don't assume the same about natural languages. No Western reader will take a peek at a webpage written in Japanese and cry "I can't understand how people speak this language". (Not in this day and age, at least).
It's most pronounced with lisp and ml-style languages, but I've also seen Java lifers bounce off of things as innocuous as Python's list comprehensions.
I get a little bit wistful when I see people bouncing off of exotic languages. Where's the delight in a chance to discover something new, and the excitement of a new thing to wrap one's mind around? It makes me wonder if some magic has been lost, or isn't being passed along like it should be.
Well not speak it, but reading it... yes. Japanese writing is like a prank that I would not believe is real... and I still doubt it.
This is a really smart guy with a gift for languages struggling with it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcdYKxHT8kY (NativLang 7m10s)
...and yet children can do it. Use that as a lesson.
Children? No, it takes them up to middle school to get somewhat proficient with Kanji knowledge for daily life, but they can still not read a lot of Kanji at that point.
Trust me you can learn this too on the same time span and semi-full immersion if you started now.
I analogize Blub more to Legal Latin: you're using an uncommon reference point to explain the material that could be explained perfectly well without it. The example I'd give is call/cc; I'm sure I could give a thorough description of how call/cc works, and leave a lot of programmers in the dust by doing so. Or I could explain how the yield operator works, and most of those some programmers would suddenly understand what I'm talking about. But they're basically the same thing (the only real difference being that yield continuation magic can only operate within its generator function, whereas call/cc works across function boundaries).
Should Haskell practitioners cater to C-like developers? If so, why bother with Haskell at all? This is one step removed from saying "just write an improved C and forget about Haskell", and in fact there have been attempts at it! It's just that they aren't Haskell.
Is it too much to ask of people trying to understand Haskell code to learn about it first?
It adds to the perception of "I need to understand masters level maths to use Haskell".
What about words like "operator", "function", "mapping"? Those are all from math too.
Besides, learning what a "monoid" is is not harder than learning what a for-loop is or a hash map. They aren't natural concepts, but they are easy to learn by programmers.
To compare it to spoken communication, there's a threshold where very formal queen's English from an extremely eloquent person makes them sound like an obnoxious showoff rather than fancy and serious. I feel like posts about Haskell often touch that threshold without a good reason. But that's my very subjective opinion.
We don't, that's the point. We abstract it above numbers, so that we can find that lists and natural numbers and many other things share the same "shape" when looked at from certain perspectives.
It's not about showing off, but about finding generalizations -- finding the "shape" of things -- that allow us to use the same abstractions over them.
And to talk about these shapes, we must use the appropriate vocabulary. It's shorter and more precise. Just like you say "function" instead of explaining what it means in lots of words every time you mean function.
As mumblemumble says, I think this is due to a blinkered understanding of programming, combined with the mistaken belief that if you know one programming language it's pretty straightforward to learn any other language.
If someone knows Java, Python, and JavaScript, and their idea of exotic languages are Rust and Go, then they have no appreciation of how diverse programming languages really are. Lisp, Haskell, Forth, Prolog, and assembly, will strike them as completely alien, which should be fine except they're under the impression that it's meant to be easy to learn another language.
not all things require the same amount of effort to be understood at an adequate level.
> If you find a text in German and you don't understand a word, because you have never studied German, do you think you are too stupid to speak German?
there are definitely people that are able to look at a german text without having ever studied german before and make sense of it in a rough way
Sure, by knowing both English and Swedish, German has sufficiently little "uniqueness" left to it that I can often get a rough idea of a German text despite never studying it. But how is this different from reading Haskell when you've previously worked in Scala and Rust?