[wk_end]

The audience is going to meet the article where they're at.

It's fine for, say, a blog post aimed at Haskellers to assume Haskell knowledge, but when posted on a board largely consisting of people without Haskell knowledge, it's natural that you're going to get at least a few people saying, "hey, I don't understand this".

But I'll be honest - I'm familiar with Haskell and the ML module system and the underlying concept (that typeclasses and modules are roughly equivalent in some sense), but I'm unfamiliar with Backpack so I still struggled to follow it a little. The target audience is an extremely narrow niche. So I think it's just somewhat poorly written; it doesn't feel like the author really had an audience in mind, other than themselves. There's probably ways of writing this - without spending too much time regurgitating the basics - that would be more palatable to more people.

[solomonb]

> The audience is going to meet the article where they're at.

I hear you on this point but anyone can post anything on this forum. The burden should not be on the author to write a post that aligns with whatever forum their blog might get posted onto.

[teddyh]

The author is free to ignore any and all complaints they consider unfounded. It’s not even like the author is recieving any complaints personally; they have to come here to see any. And if they come here, they will get to read the viewpoint visible from here.

[scrubs]

Bingo- post to hn ... you'll get per review. Thats the deal.

[scrubs]

Death? cryOfUprising? Why be weird? Is the article supposed to communicate something or is it an entry in the author's personal diary that got out? Sheesh. ... I know language profs try hard to teach people to write. It wouldn't kill to listen.