On 14/12/06, Conrad Parker
What [hackers] are, unapologetically, is hostile to people who seem to be unwilling to think or to do their own homework before asking questions. People like that are time sinks — they take without giving back, and they waste time we could have spent on another question more interesting and another person more worthy of an answer. We call people like this "losers" (and for historical reasons we sometimes spell it "lusers").
I hope the Haskell community never adopts such an arrogant tone.
I really agree with this. I think that one of the reasons that the Haskell community has grown to be so polite and helpful compared to many communities of comparable size is that kindness begets kindness. There's been a lot of chatter lately about how the Haskell community can grow faster than it has been. Personally, I would rather not have it grow any faster than we can manage. If there was a sudden influx of 10000 brand-new Haskell users overnight (unattached to some pre-existing educational program), I think this community would quickly have a major problem answering all the mailing list and IRC traffic. If the community grows gradually, we'll easily be able to support it, because there will be a correspondingly larger number of experts and intermediate level users to help us out. Remember, if some significant factor of Haskell programmers advocate the language just to two of their friends, that's still exponential growth. There are also lots of other reasons why growing too quickly and gaining commercial users too quickly are double edged swords. Personally, I'd like to see the Prelude undergo a few more iterations, and it gets harder to change as more and more projects rely on it. When it does change, the maintenance cost of old code goes up, and not every project has an active maintainer. Popularity also results in large numbers of people who are invested in a particular way of doing things and are resistant to change. Haskell is a research language, and I'd personally like to see it remain a research language as its user-base grows. Granted, it would be better than the 30-year-old-at-heart programming languages people are using today, but I don't think I'd be truly satisfied if the Haskell which everyone used was not the Haskell which the researchers were working on with all the cool new ideas in it. I'm not saying "don't advocate Haskell", I love it too, and I like seeing new users, but I think we need to take some care in maintaining our excellent community while we're at it. Advocating the language on a grassroots basis means that each new user gets a mentor, or if not one, then an equivalent-mentor spread across the community, and people who have been mentored in such a way tend to repay it many times over in helping other beginners. Having a tightly-knit community who have adopted the mindset of following language development closely will also help offset the costs of change to the language. There are lots of benefits to growing the community, I just think that these are things to consider before we take out a full-page ad in the New York Times. :) - Cale