You might also be a little biased being a yesod developer and all. For what it is worth, I found both the happstack and snap communities far more helpful. Yesod makes a ton of assumptions, and questioning those assumptions was met with "just start liking what I like".

I am certainly biased, but these are all objective measurements. I am not claiming that the Yesod community is better, just that it is more active. I am sorry you didn't have a good experience. If you can point to specifics of inflexibility that can help us re-think our design.

Can you show numbers? E.g. number/size of deployments, community size in terms of contributors and mailing list subscribers? How many other packages are dependent on the frameworks? (E.g. Hakyll uses Snap, gitit uses happstack).

Those are objective measures, but without measurements they say nothing.

I subscribe to Happstack's mail list. It has < 1 message/day on their mail list.

Looking at the Snap framework google group there were 7 threads in March and 1 in April. Yesod has had ~15 threads in April and seems to have averaged ~2 threads/day in March.

I am busy at the moment. Perhaps you can help answer your own questions and add to this.

How did you measure the number of yesod, snap and happstack users? "Objective measurement" means something. Keep in mind, "there's more traffic on mailing list X" doesn't mean there's more users of software X, it means there's more users asking questions about it. Given that yesod is much larger, it doesn't seem terribly unreasonable for there to be more questions about using it.

I think you've been displaying the inflexibility I refer to right here. "Everyone loves hamlet because I said so, if you don't love it you don't exist because I said everyone loves it". I understand you like the tools and methods you use, but your reaction to other people preferring other things appears hostile and/or dismissive. Accepting that people can like a different template engine without being objectively wrong might lead to yesod users having a plurality of template engines to choose from.

I concur. The comments from Greg on this article are rife with exactly what you're describing. I have avoided Yesod so far because something about the way the Yesod developers conduct themselves rubs me the wrong way. Now I know what it is.

Michael Snoyman seems to have responded to the whole situation in this blog post:

  http://www.yesodweb.com/blog/2012/04/working-together

I have to say he has increased my respect for him immensely with this.

at this point measuring users or user bases is impossible.

i argue it is also useless.

compared to Servlets+JSP/Rails/Django all of Haskell's web frameworks are smaller-then-tiny.

but: functional programming is on the rise, haskell has become fast and robust, haskell's static typing is seen as an advantage... people want to use haskell for web programming; so haskell web frameworks are seeing growth.

to me Yesod seems to have the edge currently: it is most actively developed and discussed.

i used snap, and liked it, but having tried both i feel yesod makes more sense (maybe because i'm coming from rails).