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I think Haskell is a beautiful language, but it's community seems too elitist and pedantic, which from my perspective makes people value sophistication and "ele

I think Haskell is a beautiful language, but it's community seems too elitist and pedantic, which from my perspective makes people value sophistication and "elegance" over readability and ease of comprehension. I'd recommend Elixir, it's code is beautifully readable, it's pragmatically functional since it's based on Erlang, I'm not refuting Haskell usefulness in the real world, I'm just pointing out it's functional nature is academic, while Erlang's functional essence is pretty much a colateral effect of the problems it was aimed to solve. edit: Thinking again, even from the academic perspective, I'd still go for something like Racket, in my sense of aesthetic there's no competition to the beautiful simplicity of lisp.

neilparikh 9y ago
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.
- Sophistifunk 9y ago
  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"
  - neilparikh 9y ago
    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.
    - tome 9y ago
      Indeed, the Haskell community is very self critical, much to its credit. https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/3b498l/if_you_could_change_one_thing_about_haskell_what/ https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/3b498l/if_you_coul...
- erik14th 9y ago
  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.

neilparikh 9y ago

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.

Sophistifunk 9y ago
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"
- neilparikh 9y ago
  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.
  - tome 9y ago
    Indeed, the Haskell community is very self critical, much to its credit. https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/3b498l/if_you_could_change_one_thing_about_haskell_what/ https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/3b498l/if_you_coul...
erik14th 9y ago
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.