As a bit of an outsider (recruiter) that talks to people in various areas of programming, there does seem to be some perceived hierarchy in programming that is

As a bit of an outsider (recruiter) that talks to people in various areas of programming, there does seem to be some perceived hierarchy in programming that is somewhat related to language communities, and I sense it quite a bit on HN. I can see how functional programmers could feel that what they are doing is more complex than what non-FP'ers are doing, generally speaking. Based on how people reference complexity, I'd think FP languages would be considered to be at the top of the language community hierarchy. Even within FP, I don't feel it's a stretch to think many view Haskell and Lisps "above" say Scala. On HN, we may see more about Rust than we would out in the wild. I do find that FP communities tend to seem inviting to at least some other language communities and are eager to introduce the FP world to certain other groups (say Python, Java) but perhaps less likely to other language communities (PHP).