"Them" refers to the developers using languages other than Haskell: "We provided them with a copy of P1 without explaining that it was a program, and based on

"Them" refers to the developers using languages other than Haskell: "We provided them with a copy of P1 without explaining that it was a program, and based on preconceptions from their past experience, they had studied P1 under the assumption that it was a mixture of requirements specification and top level design. They were convinced it was incomplete because it did not address issues such as data structure design and execution order.” "The other kind of response had more to do with the 'cleverness' of the solution...[one of them] described the Haskell prototype as being 'too cute for its own good'. These both sound like they could have been written today. Reminds me of this from the Incomplete and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages: Haskell gets some resistance due to the complexity of using monads to control side effects. Wadler tries to appease critics by explaining that 'a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what's the problem?'