smug pseudo-mathematical community vs glib anti-intellectual community, fight!
(actually, don't, this is the farthest thing from a helpful framing)
Conversation
Not sure how to frame it better, but while doing Haskell the feeling of "We're doing category theory, therefore we're so much better than everyone else!" was omnipresent.
It's especially sad because most of the CT in Haskell is basic and/or surface level and not done properly.
1
14
I'm curious if you can point to an example of somebody saying anything resembling "therefore we're better than everyone else!", or if it is strictly a suspicion you harbor about the darkness in the hearts of category theorists?
3
5
Just my impression. I'll see if I can google up some examples of this.
Things seem to have improved a lot in the meantime, btw. It seems the community is much nicer, people really work on an IDE now, etc.
Btw, I never said category theorists. Haskellers adopting pieces of CT.
1
3
OK. If this sentiment is "omnipresent" it should be easy to find examples all over the place. My sense is that it is easy to find people smearing FP folks based on strawmen caricatures like this, but the strawmen themselves are quite hard to find.
3
5
Yeah, that was a bad phrasing. I meant it appeared omnipresent to me (which is a much weaker statement).
It's also certainly possible I am wrong, either seeing things that were not there or just seeing a tiny part of the community that was not representative.
1
2
Appreciate the sentiment. It's frustrating building a relatively tiny community where almost everyone is unusually kind and excited about the elegance of some developing ideas, and having to fight these vague negative characterizations all the time.
3
1
5
While that might be more accurate, are you actually suggesting these “vague negative characterization” are born out of nothing? I trust you too much to believe that.
If there are few bad apples (and Marek named a second one), has the Haskell community distanced itself from them?
1
2
my sense and ideal is that there is no such thing as "the Haskell community" or "the Rust community", there are loosely affiliated sub-communities that use these languages and we shouldn't paint with a broad stroke
5
3
Obviously all communities are formed of overlapping subcommunities. But the original Rust community created strong values that are widely shared, while the original academic Haskell community did not do that and the difference is extremely apparent at this point.
2
1
13
Yeah, even though there are a lot of challenges in growth (especially on Reddit), I think Rust is a good example that laying a strong foundation of community standards early is important, as people start setting up conferences, meetups, community Discords, etc.
No argument that community standards matter, but Haskell is decades old and started as an academic project, and as Sam said, the academic Haskell community is quite friendly and pleasant. Industrial Haskell is not centrally planned like Rust, so we should not treat it as such.
1
1
This is how I want people to think about it instead. I'll leave it at that.
Quote Tweet
Replying to @neurocy @samth and 3 others
There are sub-communities around Haskell that are no less friendly and welcoming and helpful as the parts of the Rust community that we all like. I wish people would acknowledge the hard work of these people and point people to them instead of the endless smearing.
1
4
Show replies