> I’ve lost count of the stories I have heard from others about how our community welcomed them when they needed a friend, felt alienated and alone, doubted themselves, or felt like they couldn’t make it in the world.

Wow, I never thought a programming language community can help people overcome negative feelings. These storeis are really nice.

Much like novels and poetry, math and programming have sincerely contributed to my happiness.

It is not that I can't socialize or don't have friends, it's just that I don't like what most people do (like watching sports, and talking about uninteresting things, etc.) And save some specific people, I feel burned out after spending time with other people. I am known to many as an extremely sociable, and friendly person. I just don't like it.

On top of that, being heretically progressive (truly progressive, e.g. criticizing and disliking all religions and all patriarchy- Christian, Islamic, and Hindu- not toeing the modern woke liberal agenda), I cannot freely express myself except in front of my parents, SO, and about two friends.

In such a life, programming brings immense bliss. I profoundly enjoy poetry, and novels, but they are something you are consuming. I love to create things, modify and change things.

Programming, whether in microcontrollers for hobby, or solving business problems with innovative solutions, or solving project Euler problems, I feel immense joy. If programming did not exist, my life would have been significantly worse.

Why can't FOSS projects get structural support from governments, the way science is funded?

Science is funded by money from projects. You write a project proposal and apply for funding. Isn't ghc funded by money from Glasgow University or something like that?

Some contributors are, but Simon PJ is at Microsoft Research and Simon Marlow used to be too (in case you were wondering where F# came from).

Also, funding projects not people is a relatively recent notion; e.g. most fundamental physics breakthroughs of the 20th century were done by people who didn’t have to write grant applications.

Exactly - and the amount of effort this consumes is immense. You end up with grant-writing and paper-publishing institutions where the actual advance of knowledge is squeezed between the two.

But what is the alternative? You need a generic way of deciding who gets how much money and I don't see another way except for the whole project application process. The only alternative is someone gives money to things he likes... Companies can afford that but the public sector cannot because it is ripe for corruption.

There are companies who can do the grant-writing for you.

> Science is funded by money from projects.

Yes, FOSS projects are projects too? Or use subprojects if you need more funding for the same project?

Because FOSS development and bureaucracy don't match, I think. Applying for grants is a huge administrative burden (both to acquire and to document the spending) so only the largest projects have enough organizational overhead to justify spending effort on it.

You're going in a dangerously socialist direction here. Let the free market sort it out, and may the best man (billionaire) win. We get innovation & progress that way.

Article mentioned Apple with their own mainstream language, I suppose Swift. But it's far from being mainstream, didn't gain the desired attention and failed miserably with TensorFlow. Thus, it's a niche language making no sense outside of the Apple ecosystem. Is not a serious contender to Haskell.

While my preferred languages are Common Lisp, Clojure, Haskell, and Scheme, I must say that Swift is pretty nice.

Apple’s supplied deep learning models are useful and easy to use, and compiling on an IPad Pro or M1 Mac is fast, even with the type inferencing. Right now I am slogging through a 50 hour SwiftUI 2 class.

I am disappointed that TensorFlow for Swift has been mothballed, but Julia and Python are probably much better options for deep learning. BTW, Julia is a fairly good general purpose language also. I have played with little bits of Julia code for text manipulation, REST, SPARQL queries, etc.

EDIT: since this is a Haskell thread, pardon the plug: you can grab a free copy of my Haskell book at https://markwatson.com

Swift is mainstream in Apple ecosystem, like VB (and C# before dotnet went open source) was in MS ecosystem back in the day. I'm not questioning Haskell influence and importance, but, what you think, how many developers use Swift and get paid to work in Swift every day, compared to Haskell developers?

Swift TensorFlow wasn't an Apple thing, I think. And it never made sense in the first place ...

I would love to know some actual numbers. It does seem like Swift adoption on server/Linux by people who aren't already Mac/iOS developers is horrendously low.

Swift is mainstream on the context of Apple ecosystem.

Not everyone cares about cross platform.

Thanks for the question. I'm the author of the article, and I can talk about why I included that paragraph. It's not because everything has to be about racial diversity. Rather, it's because I was already writing about some kinds of diversity, and when I reflected on people I know in the Haskell community, I realized that we've got some pretty interesting characters, and that this is due to communities like Tidal Cycles. Tidal Cycles is a great example of why something that's not at all important to corporate sponsors is nevertheless a cornerstone of the language community. I've had the chance to meet some really interesting people with interesting stories who I wouldn't have met if Haskell were just a language for writing web services.

Not the parent poster, but I do think it's worth putting a finger on what might simply be a cultural gap between modern (and especially fairly plugged-in) Americans and others who either genuinely have not been socialised into the present-day US discourse about race or are deliberately acting defiant about it due to how it conflicts with the framework that they grew up with.

It seems to me that according to present-day American norms, including a remark such as the one that you did is simply considered good form; you show that even if you are not actively working on the great political causes that are being so eloquently argued to be of existential importance by their protagonists every day, you are certainly aware of them, support the good guys and ready to do your part for their cause if it you are in a situation in which you can contribute. Meanwhile, for those who adhere to a framework in which the prescription for making sure historical instances of racism don't repeat is to banish race as a category from human thinking and discourse as far as possible, the very mention of it in a context where there seemed to be no external reason to is gauche in a similar way to if you suddenly started talking about sexual prowess (taking care to insert a parenthetical remark about what you believe about your own). It doesn't seem to me like your explanation of the "why" here is particularly helpful to cross that gap of expectations, either; it only really makes sense if the reader is already primed to assume that describing people as "interesting characters" and unusual people must at least suggest something about race and gender, but from the other side's perspective this is not any less gauche, especially as it might be taken to suggest that what makes those characters "interesting" to you is just a matter of those characteristics.

Even worse, if the culturally remote reader's degree of familiarity with modern US norms is not zero, the one blurb they likely have in mind is something like "the US has a self-admitted racism problem". In that case, a remark such as the one you made might not just register as introducing a topic that is unsuitable for polite conversation, but actually as betraying attitudes that are opposite to what you wished to communicate - imagine if for instance a speaker of the German police, talking about something mundane such as their strategies for fighting pickpockets in Frankfurt, injected a line lamenting the small number of Jews in the force. Indeed, if my read of US society is correct, antisemitism is one context in which the other (older?) version of antiracism norms still survives in it. To get a rough model of how a given post or statement would sound to the cultural outsider, then, you could try to imagine your post with everything mentioning race replaced with analogous remarks along the "Jewish or not Jewish?" axis.

I think of it as a four-step process. Take Sonia Sotomayor, for a not-currently-controversial example. Step one is that she can't be a Supreme Court justice because she's hispanic. Step 2 is, she's hispanic, but she can be a Supreme Court justice anyway. Step 3 is that she's nominated to be a Supreme Court justice, and nobody mentions that she's hispanic. Step 4 is that, when she's nominated for the Supreme Court, people mention that she's hispanic, but in the same way that they mention that she was born in the Bronx - as background personal-interest information, not as a "does that disqualify her or not" issue.

The US started at step 1. It's moved to step 2. My personal impression is that it was moving to step 3, though I'm sure that at least some people will disagree. But it seems to me that the current progressive approach is dragging us back to step 2, not moving us toward step 4. And I think that the older approach, what you call "a framework in which the prescription for making sure historical instances of racism don't repeat is to banish race as a category from human thinking and discourse as far as possible", would have gotten us at least solidly to step 3, and maybe eventually to step 4.

I don't think dragging everything back to step 2 is progress.

Fair enough. For my part, I didn't include that comment as just an obligatory remark, though. I did so because it occurs to me that, for instance, the only tech community I'm involved in where I have regularly met people who identify as non-binary gender is Haskell. I don't think that's entirely a coincidence, and I do think it's related to the strong role played by non-industry Haskell programmers in the community. So I said so.

You're of course correct that mentioning so-called "race" as a legitimate category at all is extremely divisive outside of a very U.S.-centric and very intellectually-niche discourse, but there's also a sensible norm against injecting any kind of politics in quasi-professional contexts where people should be able to cooperate seamlessly across political, cultural, and intellectual divides.

These tiresome and uninteresting remarks about U.S.-centric political causes, no matter how worthwhile these causes may be on their own terms, stand out as an eminently avoidable reminder of uncomfortable social conflict.

Eminently avoidable as long as you're not wearing the color of your skin out in public.

That's really the crux of all of this. There are people for whom racism is an unavoidable, daily issue. Yet there's no way to bring that up without making people uncomfortable. After being told, "You can't talk about it here; you can't talk about it there", people will eventually say, "Fine, I'm going to talk about it everywhere, because no place seems to be any worse than any other."

I personally am very conflict-averse, and much prefer it when people remain very polite. But reading HN in particular, I've come to realize that a lot of people are still going to insist that racism isn't a problem in the US and demand that others not talk about it. They assume that if they're not seeing it then it's not a problem for anybody -- or worse, they're deliberately inflicting it and hiding among those who are merely obtuse.

I find that so offensive that it overrides even my conflict aversion.

> Yet there's no way to bring that up without making people uncomfortable.

I'm pretty sure that there's plenty of ways to do that. What turns people off to the real, actual problems is casual and unhelpful claims like "the U.S. is an inherently racist/white supremacist country" or the like. What that looks like to outsiders is folks who want to seem like they're meaningfully talking about real issues that some might face, but all they manage to do is to be divisive and stir up pointless conflict for the heck of it. At that point, tuning out is a sensible response.

That sounds to me like an excuse to not engage.

We all watched a man be murdered last year, and HN was filled with people making excuses for the murderer. He was convicted only because every single person watched it; others whose murders weren't caught on film escaped punishment. Much less the numerous others that are less than murder.

When people can't even agree that a murder in front of their eyes was a bad thing, I'm going to say out loud that something is deeply wrong. If that seems like a pointless conflict to you, then it's going to keep happening and I'm going to be shocked that I have to say to your face that it's bad.

If your aggravation about their time offends you more than the injustice done to them, then you know why the tone will keep getting more aggravating.

Thank you for responding and keeping it respectful.

I had to go back and reread the article to find the reference you objected to.

The article has 25 paragraphs. Near the bottom of the article, one line in one paragraph, mentioned racial diversity in passing.

Is that really a problem for you ?

I think there is a meaningful difference between the predicates "is about racial diversity" and "mentions racial diversity in one paragraph near the bottom".

I read this as, "everything ends up having a link to racial diversity".

I also don't get it, but where I live, race isn't the principal eigenvector of literally everything.

Yes, but you do have Netflix and CNN where you live, don't you? So then it's your problem too! :-p

This article talked about so much more than racial diversity, is that all you got out of it?

How did you arrive at the conclusion that everything has to be about racial diversity? I look at the front page of HN, and very few submissions are about racial diversity. Even in this very article (which is a tiny slice of the discussion on HN) I see very little about racial diversity.

In what sense did you mean everything has to be about racial diversity?

Because it's a programming language we're talking about, not a political party.

> Because it's a programming language we're talking about, not a political party.

Categorically wrong. This is a programming language community that we're talking about. Haskell hasn't dropped out of thin air. It's the output of a mostly-voluntary community effort. To strengthen the community by making it open to people who have different backgrounds is to strengthen the language.

The real question is why do you only see racial diversity as a problem.

> The real question is why do you only see racial diversity as a problem.

My question to you would be why did you interpret that person's comment that way? Rejecting the hyper-focus on racial diversity which is common in some parts of progressive Western culture is not at all the same as seeing racial diversity as a problem. I agree that in a broad sense a community is strengthened by diverse membership, but I don't agree that the White Guilt hinted at in the original article is constructive.

I think you've constructed a straw-man to argue against here, and that's not at a very nice thing to do.

As the author of the article, I hope it's clear that we're talking about the community that has formed around the programming language. Racial diversity isn't, to the best of my knowledge, mentioned at all in the Haskell Report or the source code to the GHC compiler. But when I'm talking about the community, that is all about the people in that community. Some of the people in that community have very different backgrounds from myself, and I think that's a valuable thing to celebrate and acknowledge.

That said, it wasn't the point of the article. It's fast becoming the point of this comment thread, though, which is unfortunate.

I fall to see how that is an answer to my question. What, specifically, made you think everything is about racial diversity?

I would very much like for you to explain to me how everything you read is about racial diversity, when so little of what I read seems to be.