[Haskell-cafe] Re: Let's welcome the Ruby hackers!

[apfelmus at quantentunnel.de]

Alexis wrote:
> In contrast with other IT-related communities i've experienced, 
> i've found the Haskell community (both here and on IRC) to generally be 
> helpful, good-humoured and mercifully lacking in flames and alpha 
> behaviours. :-)

I have to reject this claim because there are quite many alphas in here.

For instance, ∀α.α notoriously tries to creep in every discussion, just
because he thinks that he is principally more general than the others.
Of course, he's a blatant liar.

Another well known troll is ∀α.α -> α. While at least not throwing in
contradictory posts, he greatly overestimates his role. Most often, you
can just elide his contributions as he only repeats prior arguments.
Sometimes, he even signs his posts with the pseudonym (∀α.α -> α)->(∀α.α
-> α) to rise in rank, but this is easily seen through.

The list once tried to employ alpha-conversion to get rid of them. But
the only effect was that now, the betas annoy us as well! A particularly
 persistent offspring is ∀α.α -> β -> β giving rise to much debate in
regular intervals: he managed to subvert parametricity. Also, the
mischievous ∀αβ.α -> β even plotted with evil IO to get the attention he
thinks he deserves.

In the end, the alphas and betas are noisy braggarts, talking very long
about what they want to do without doing anything at all. It's the
lambdas who do all the real work. Fortunately, they most often don't
need the signature from their alpha bosses.


Regards,
apfelmus

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