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"All the Haskellers I have met seem to be quite normal, helpful" This is the same kind of weak response you see from Rubyists whenever someone points out their

"All the Haskellers I have met seem to be quite normal, helpful" This is the same kind of weak response you see from Rubyists whenever someone points out their community's well-documented asshole problem (eg: Steve Klabnik bringing a woman to tears by publicly ridiculing her project and offering only an insincere non-apology when called on it, any blog post ever by DHH or ZS, Felipe Contreras' tantrums on public mailing lists): "Well, in my experience, everyone in my community is super nice and helpful, so you must be wrong." Off the top of my head, I can easily recall several Haskellers on HN who've come across to me in the past as pricks, and on multiple occasion at that: dons, loup-vaillant, and coolsunglasses. The Haskell community, like that of Ruby, is quickly getting the reputation it deserves.

fp-incompleted 11y ago
Some concrete examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9036331 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9036331 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8646242 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8646242 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9973567 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9973567
- spatulon 11y ago
  OK, those are pretty bad.
boothead 11y ago
The thing is that it's not a "weak response", it really is people's opinion. I've experienced some cases where I've been spoken to a bit sharply, and some where people have come across a bit impatient when I haven't "got" something they understand. The thing is that I don't process it as people coming across as a dick, so my subjective experience is that the community is helpful. As to the three examples [1] you picked out of Haskellers coming across as pricks, I honestly, truely, completely don't see anything in any of these comments beyond forthright assertions of opinion. Would you be able to maybe break down what you find objectionable? [1] As disclosure: I currently work with dons, and I also know willtim.
- fp-incompletd 11y ago
  You're defending a guy who marshaled his supporters to spam his unremarkable tiling window manager here so heavily in some apparent (and unsuccessful) Haskell promotion campaign that there are now nearly as many posts (search if you don't believe me) about it as there are about KDE. (At least the size of the downloads are comparable; a whopping half GB for those without the exact required versions of GHC and sundry cabal dependencies installed.) If you don't understand what's offensive about condescendingly spewing falsehoods like "if it compiles, it works" or saying that you can't respect a CS department that uses Python for its introductory CS courses instead of Haskell (and thus doesn't expect its freshmen to know what a Kleisli category is), you've obviously drank too much of the Haskell Kool-Aid to maintain objectivity.
  - boothead 11y ago
    I'm not defending anyone - I'm seeking to understand your point of view better. But language like "Marshaled his supporters" makes me wonder if there's something else I've missed. I use XMonad and quite like it other haskellers I know have moved on to i3. Not sure I've ever seen it being "spammed". The if it compiles works thing... That's unfortunately overblown and hyperbolic, but in my experience of the Haskell community in London, it's usually uttered as a tongue in cheek joke. I'm not sure I'd characterize it as condescendingly spewing falsehoods. However, let me tell you about my first experience building a little thing while learning Haskell: As a total newbie, I wanted to pull some timeseries from a database and plot them on a UI. It took me days of grabbing some time here and there, learning which DB library I should use and how the diagrams package worked. I finally got it to compile without any errors. As a python programmer this was a completely new way of programming for me, and I now fully expected the real work of making it run to begin. The VERY first time I ran it - up popped a timeseries visualization. Mind. Blown! So as you state it, "if it compiles it works" might be a falsehood, but there's more than a grain of truth there. As for your other comment. What Tim actually said was: > An institution that teaches Python under the banner of computer science, certainly loses prestige in my opinion He didn't say that he "can't respect" it, nor did he say that CS should exclusively be taught in Haskell. He said, that teaching it in python lowers its prestige (and later clarifies that he means that as a vehicle for teaching CS rather than programming). As I mentioned, I'm a self taught programmer, beginning with python. Since then I've worked at hedge funds and investment banks in python and built a startup on Haskell. My opinion is built on my own direct experience, and I find it somewhat disrespectful that you dismiss it as "drinking the Haskell Kool-Aid".
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
spatulon 11y ago
For what it's worth, @steveklabnik's apology was pretty good. I definitely wouldn't describe it as "an insincere non-apology" - he acknowledged the effect he had on the other person, and actually said the words "I am sorry" instead of something passive and weaselly like "I apologise" or "Sorry if...". http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2013-01-23-node http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2013-01-23-node
- fp-incompletd 11y ago
  "I'm sorry, and feel terrible that I made someone feel terrible" is tantamount to saying "I'm sorry you were offended." He's merely expressing regret at her reaction, not admitting that his actions that caused said reaction--specifically, mocking her for writing a sed-like utility in JS--were uncalled for. Further, I'm confident that if she'd written the program that spurred her undeserved public shaming in Ruby, he and his fellow Twitter bullies would not have voiced any complaint.
  - steveklabnik 11y ago
    I haven't re-read my blog post, but let me be clear: my actions back then are something that I deeply regret to this day. I think about it on something like a weekly basis, still.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  - Veedrac 11y ago
    > "I'm sorry, and feel terrible that I made someone feel terrible" is tantamount to saying "I'm sorry you were offended." Wow, I could not read that any more differently. It's like arguing "I'm sorry, and feel terrible that I hurt your toe" is tantamount to saying "I'm sorry your toe hurts when it's stepped on". I find that notion a little strange.
  - thesteamboat 11y ago
    I'm not sure you read the same apology I just did. > SK: i dont want people to think i'm saying "i got caught being an asshole so i'm saying sorry" > SK: i want to say "I was accidentally being an asshole so i'm sorry" > So, I'll just leave it at that. Twitter makes it so hard not to accidentally be an asshole. He's admitting that he was "being an asshole" and is trying to empathize. "I'm sorry you were offended" means being offended was your choice. "I made someone feel terrible" means I did something bad to that person. I'm not familiar with the JS community or Steve Klabnik in particular, but that's a pretty straightforward and sincere apology.
axman6 11y ago
It's curious seeing you mention this, while completely ignoring how overwhelmingly negative the linked to thread is, devolving into personal attacks for no good reason - the other linked discussions between various language communities have been very civil and fun to read, but reading this bunch of OCamlers writing long lists of often minor deficiencies shows to me a level of insecurity I haven't seen elsewhere, and I find it very unappealing. It's enough for me to not want to try OCaml because the community seems very hostile. And it's not just jdh, even without his (your?) comments, it's overwhelmingly negative, and needlessly so.
mercurial 11y ago
> The Haskell community, like that of Ruby, is quickly getting the reputation it deserves. By the same token, you could describe the community of Haskell as witty and friendly by taking SPJ as an example. In my experience, the Haskell community is fairly free of vitriol and of the drama which is fairly common in open-source communities.

fp-incompleted 11y ago

Some concrete examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9036331 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9036331 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8646242 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8646242 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9973567 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9973567

spatulon 11y ago
OK, those are pretty bad.

boothead 11y ago

The thing is that it's not a "weak response", it really is people's opinion. I've experienced some cases where I've been spoken to a bit sharply, and some where people have come across a bit impatient when I haven't "got" something they understand. The thing is that I don't process it as people coming across as a dick, so my subjective experience is that the community is helpful. As to the three examples [1] you picked out of Haskellers coming across as pricks, I honestly, truely, completely don't see anything in any of these comments beyond forthright assertions of opinion. Would you be able to maybe break down what you find objectionable? [1] As disclosure: I currently work with dons, and I also know willtim.

fp-incompletd 11y ago
You're defending a guy who marshaled his supporters to spam his unremarkable tiling window manager here so heavily in some apparent (and unsuccessful) Haskell promotion campaign that there are now nearly as many posts (search if you don't believe me) about it as there are about KDE. (At least the size of the downloads are comparable; a whopping half GB for those without the exact required versions of GHC and sundry cabal dependencies installed.) If you don't understand what's offensive about condescendingly spewing falsehoods like "if it compiles, it works" or saying that you can't respect a CS department that uses Python for its introductory CS courses instead of Haskell (and thus doesn't expect its freshmen to know what a Kleisli category is), you've obviously drank too much of the Haskell Kool-Aid to maintain objectivity.
- boothead 11y ago
  I'm not defending anyone - I'm seeking to understand your point of view better. But language like "Marshaled his supporters" makes me wonder if there's something else I've missed. I use XMonad and quite like it other haskellers I know have moved on to i3. Not sure I've ever seen it being "spammed". The if it compiles works thing... That's unfortunately overblown and hyperbolic, but in my experience of the Haskell community in London, it's usually uttered as a tongue in cheek joke. I'm not sure I'd characterize it as condescendingly spewing falsehoods. However, let me tell you about my first experience building a little thing while learning Haskell: As a total newbie, I wanted to pull some timeseries from a database and plot them on a UI. It took me days of grabbing some time here and there, learning which DB library I should use and how the diagrams package worked. I finally got it to compile without any errors. As a python programmer this was a completely new way of programming for me, and I now fully expected the real work of making it run to begin. The VERY first time I ran it - up popped a timeseries visualization. Mind. Blown! So as you state it, "if it compiles it works" might be a falsehood, but there's more than a grain of truth there. As for your other comment. What Tim actually said was: > An institution that teaches Python under the banner of computer science, certainly loses prestige in my opinion He didn't say that he "can't respect" it, nor did he say that CS should exclusively be taught in Haskell. He said, that teaching it in python lowers its prestige (and later clarifies that he means that as a vehicle for teaching CS rather than programming). As I mentioned, I'm a self taught programmer, beginning with python. Since then I've worked at hedge funds and investment banks in python and built a startup on Haskell. My opinion is built on my own direct experience, and I find it somewhat disrespectful that you dismiss it as "drinking the Haskell Kool-Aid".

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

spatulon 11y ago

For what it's worth, @steveklabnik's apology was pretty good. I definitely wouldn't describe it as "an insincere non-apology" - he acknowledged the effect he had on the other person, and actually said the words "I am sorry" instead of something passive and weaselly like "I apologise" or "Sorry if...". http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2013-01-23-node http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2013-01-23-node

fp-incompletd 11y ago
"I'm sorry, and feel terrible that I made someone feel terrible" is tantamount to saying "I'm sorry you were offended." He's merely expressing regret at her reaction, not admitting that his actions that caused said reaction--specifically, mocking her for writing a sed-like utility in JS--were uncalled for. Further, I'm confident that if she'd written the program that spurred her undeserved public shaming in Ruby, he and his fellow Twitter bullies would not have voiced any complaint.
- steveklabnik 11y ago
  I haven't re-read my blog post, but let me be clear: my actions back then are something that I deeply regret to this day. I think about it on something like a weekly basis, still.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- Veedrac 11y ago
  > "I'm sorry, and feel terrible that I made someone feel terrible" is tantamount to saying "I'm sorry you were offended." Wow, I could not read that any more differently. It's like arguing "I'm sorry, and feel terrible that I hurt your toe" is tantamount to saying "I'm sorry your toe hurts when it's stepped on". I find that notion a little strange.
- thesteamboat 11y ago
  I'm not sure you read the same apology I just did. > SK: i dont want people to think i'm saying "i got caught being an asshole so i'm saying sorry" > SK: i want to say "I was accidentally being an asshole so i'm sorry" > So, I'll just leave it at that. Twitter makes it so hard not to accidentally be an asshole. He's admitting that he was "being an asshole" and is trying to empathize. "I'm sorry you were offended" means being offended was your choice. "I made someone feel terrible" means I did something bad to that person. I'm not familiar with the JS community or Steve Klabnik in particular, but that's a pretty straightforward and sincere apology.

axman6 11y ago

It's curious seeing you mention this, while completely ignoring how overwhelmingly negative the linked to thread is, devolving into personal attacks for no good reason - the other linked discussions between various language communities have been very civil and fun to read, but reading this bunch of OCamlers writing long lists of often minor deficiencies shows to me a level of insecurity I haven't seen elsewhere, and I find it very unappealing. It's enough for me to not want to try OCaml because the community seems very hostile. And it's not just jdh, even without his (your?) comments, it's overwhelmingly negative, and needlessly so.

mercurial 11y ago

> The Haskell community, like that of Ruby, is quickly getting the reputation it deserves. By the same token, you could describe the community of Haskell as witty and friendly by taking SPJ as an example. In my experience, the Haskell community is fairly free of vitriol and of the drama which is fairly common in open-source communities.