For my own serious work, language stability over time is a core need.
"Because dwm is customized through editing its source code, it's pointless to make binary packages of it. This keeps its userbase small and elitist. No novices asking stupid questions."
Sometimes we need to have expert/power user's tools. It's not specific to IT jobs. You can see it in many other jobs.
I understand that there are highly specialized environments/needs that are niche, but I would argue Haskell (along with most programming languages) isn’t one. It’s a programming language plain and simple. It doesn’t even have special neiche feature like Ada for proving correctness because this is going to power a fighter jet. It’s a language for CS nerds... that’s it AFAIK.
By valuing elitism, you largely are guaranteeing less positive impact on the world, as well as pushing away people who might come with ideas to improve the state of the art. You’re also letting less people experience the power and “purity” of a pure functional language, which dampens the impact those ideas can have on other developments.
I've already stopped using several applications that I've been using for years because of this sort of thing. If it keeps up, I fear I'll run out of alternatives.
I've been noticing that as various applications, operating systems, and platforms have worked to become more focused on the common person, they've been increasingly becoming less useful (and more of a pain to use) to me. I fear that if Linux actually broke into the mainstream, the same fate would befall it.