- having or showing quick intelligence or ready mental capability
They said "smart", I said "intelligence".
I am arguing a series of things. First, that being "smart" does not always mean those three things. Second, that being "smart" does not mean that you'd care to learn Haskell. Third, to suggest a tool isn't catching on because the members of the programming community aren't "smart" enough is so masturbatory it's actually insane. God forbid Haskell isn't catching on because of all the valid critiques that show up in every one of these threads and then gets dismissed under this same "Haskell smart" rhetoric.
Haskell will not catch on because the community thinks it is too smart to have to actually accommodate the programming community. Simple as that.
The person used "smart" in scare quotes, and defined that usage of smart as being those things. That seems like an explicit mark that they are not talking about all of the usual definition of the word.
> Second, that being "smart" does not mean that you'd care to learn Haskell.
That's irrelevant. If X is necessary for Y, lack of X is a good explanation for lack of Y even when X is not sufficient for Y.
> God forbid Haskell isn't catching on because of all the valid critiques that show up in every one of these threads and then gets dismissed under this same "Haskell smart" rhetoric.
If you're looking in from the outside, you may not be in a good place to distinguish between "all of these valid critiques" and "invalid complaints that arise because of misunderstanding, dated info, or outright FUD". There are absolutely valid critiques of Haskell. Most of my problems with it are things that are even more present in languages that have caught on, though, so they cannot stand alone as an explanation.
All of that said, "people aren't smart enough" isn't a claim I'd make, even with the reduced scope. I just don't think your argument is well formed.
It's weird, then, that the person that wrote the article that you and I are both commenting on has written a well regarded book using Haskell and their assertion is exactly the same as mine, no? It's also weird that the subject of this article is meant to be Rust, and yet here we are debating the idea that "Devs just aren't smart enough to understand haskell".
But, as always, I wouldn't expect a conversation about Haskell to really go anywhere. You can't comment unless you've drank the kool aid, and if you've drank the kool aid you're required to spout the same rhetoric.
Like, you don't literally mean there are Haskellers saying "we're to smart to write beginner-friendly documentation haha" right?
Jokes aside, can you give an example of this?
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.
