Comment by tome
1 day ago
Can I ask which conference? Did people behave towards you in that way at that conference, or are you referring to behaviour online? I will try to use whatever authority I have in the Haskell community to improve the situation.
(Still, hopefully in this case it's clear from instig007's reply that it's not a member of the Haskell community behaving in that way.)
This is almost exclusively just online behaviour. Everyone I met in person is very nice :).
The conference I mentioned was ZuriHac. After the key-note Q&A there was a small hallway discussion around how to grow the adoption / reach of Haskell. The conversation revolved around mostly technical points (like how Haskell is superior to x, because of y). What I found interesting was that there was little to no talk about the steep learning curve, developer ergonomics or business use-cases.
The thing is, if someone has not yet learned about functional programming, strong type systems or category theory, why / how would they see the advantages or the power of pure functions, lazy evaluation, Monads, etc. At the same time, their opinions or struggles are often dismissed due to their lack of knowledge. The parent comment is a prime example of this.
Edit: This is a great 10-minute talk that touches on the general topic: https://www.hytradboi.com/2025/419859c5-6a8f-4a49-b324-0f225... She covers a lot of this better than I can.