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by alexbanks 2107 days ago
To a larger sense (the Haskell community being kind of exhausting and toxic), there are tons of examples. As cliche as it sounds, Reddit is an integral part of programming communities in 2020 and /r/haskell is a pretty toxic wasteland. The responses to this very article on /r/haskell are a great place to find what I'm talking about at a general level.

Specifically, though, this comment is a pretty good example of what this article (and I, now), am talking about:

> Certain problems, like working with databases in the principle Haskell way, are still open questions (e.g. see effect systems). But to call a mere difference in approach "arrogant" is extremely arrogant in itself

Which points to a problem very specific to haskell, brought up in the article, which is "How do I actually get things done?" Which, according to that comment (supposedly in support of Haskell) even points out that something as obvious and boring as "using a database" isn't clearly defined in Haskell. Most programmers want to use a programming language to solve a problem. The haskeller's argument, I guess, is that Haskell tries to do that while also applying very strict constraints on how problems are solved. Great, right? Except that those constraints are so strict that even problems that aren't significant or meaningful are difficult/not well defined (like using a database).

So if the answer to "How do I get things done?" isn't "Like this" but instead "Haskell doesn't work that way", most programmers will consider this a nonstarter.

2 comments

> Which, according to that comment (supposedly in support of Haskell) even points out that something as obvious and boring as "using a database" isn't clearly defined in Haskell.

They are using a very high standard of clearly defined. Haskell has production ready ways of accessing databases and working with them today.

> problems that aren't significant or meaningful are difficult/not well defined (like using a database).

If you feel database work isn't meaningful, Haskell provides "write plain parameterized SQL, get back results" type libraries too.

I disagree database access and the realm of ORMs is simple, which is what they are talking about. You can tell by how they say "working with databases".

Other languages disagree about the best ways to work with databases. I'm sure you've seen the endless raw SQL vs ORM debates.

> ... /r/haskell is a pretty toxic wasteland. The responses to this very article on /r/haskell are a great place to find what I'm talking about at a general level.

If anyone wants to read through that thread to see exactly how toxic /r/haskell is they can find it here:

https://old.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/io3c11/essay_found...

> The author in question may be a bit of a cracked pot.

> I genuinely tried to read this and take it seriously but this is just the most cringe-worthy thing I've read in ages. I'm sorry.

> As a composition of prose, this little essay is just stylistically terrible and reallllly hard to read.

> A really dumb essay.

Just from the one post.

Do you think any frustration is warranted for all of that articles false claims?

I disagree with the cracked pot comment, that goes too far.

It is pretty cringe-worthy, is it toxic to point that out?