I think there's a mistake in imagining that there is a Haskell community or a pure functional programming community and that people you come across represent these communities.
Like, I'm a fan of the language, I do stuff with it, I worked with in professionally, I chose my school specifically to pursue it in 2005... sometimes I discuss topics related to it on the internet... but I don't really see myself as a "community member," I don't represent a community when I discuss, and the comments you're reacting to have nothing to do with me or my values.
So if stuff I say is taken as representing some "community", that's ascribing a false belonging and imagining a society where there's mostly just a loose association of different individual nerds who sometimes collaborate in different constellations.
Unless there's something systemically and blatantly wrong with some actual existing community project, I think it makes more sense to criticize individuals. There's no way to "weed out" people from the internet just because their tone is annoying.
The thing is, people gravitate to languages where they can learn about the language and its ecosystem from people they can get along with. Many people avoid confrontation - especially when they're trying to learn about something.
If you don't get along with dudebros, you're going to avoid languages where the IRC channels and forums and random online discussion about the language is populated by dudebros - if you don't get along with people who speak aggressively, you're going to avoid languages which you see people speaking aggressively in support of - if you're really not a fan of active community management a la codes of conduct, you're going to avoid languages where their users speak in favour of such things.
Rinse and repeat a bunch of cycles, and whether there's a formal community or not, there's a type of person who permeates discussion of the language and its ecosystem, and is generally accepted by users of the language. Attempting to avoid them is difficult, because the existing language users see no problem, so you're stuck with a very limited number of places to learn, interact, and ask questions without coming across them.
I don't think the people in question represent the community as a whole, but they do represent what I'm signing up for when I need to communicate about the language with others - in Haskell's case, there's a higher chance than with most languages that I'm going to come across people who will proclaim I'm stupid if I don't immediately and from birth know why XYZ abstraction is amazing and universally good. And god forbid I disagree.
> in Haskell's case, there's a higher chance than with most languages that I'm going to come across people who will proclaim I'm stupid if I don't immediately and from birth know why XYZ abstraction is amazing and universally good
It's terribly sad if this is true because it wasn't the case before. Haskellers used to be very welcoming and very tolerant of beginners struggling with the language, because we had all been through the same struggles ourselves. I hope I'm correct when I say that the two public Haskell fora that I participate in (Haskell Reddit and haskell-cafe) would never proclaim anyone as stupid.
Like, I'm a fan of the language, I do stuff with it, I worked with in professionally, I chose my school specifically to pursue it in 2005... sometimes I discuss topics related to it on the internet... but I don't really see myself as a "community member," I don't represent a community when I discuss, and the comments you're reacting to have nothing to do with me or my values.
So if stuff I say is taken as representing some "community", that's ascribing a false belonging and imagining a society where there's mostly just a loose association of different individual nerds who sometimes collaborate in different constellations.
Unless there's something systemically and blatantly wrong with some actual existing community project, I think it makes more sense to criticize individuals. There's no way to "weed out" people from the internet just because their tone is annoying.