No, but doing something nobody else has done is not "Becoming a layman's authority/source on a subject" it's being on the "cutting edge of research" even if it's not academic research.
No, but you're on the cutting edge of straw-man argumentation trivializing.
Doing something that has been done very few times, or not ever, in a whole programming paradigm (building a game functionally)
is qualitatively and quantitatively different than:
doing something that has been done trivially for centuries just not in this particular day && by somebody else than you && in one piece of furniture you own (you sitting on a chair).
If you cannot understand this, I guess it makes no sense further arguing about it.
If only I was that good!
Research contributions generally have be novel AND significant. We have seen that novelty alone is not sufficient (sitting in the chair). Significant generally means applicable to a broad range of problems. Monads are significant, as one abstraction can encode a huge range of structures (containers, control flow, etc.) Building a game in Haskell is not a priori novel OR significant. People have done this before (e.g. http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Frag). Haskell has good facilities for managing concurrency and state. It's not obvious to me that one would need to go beyond these to build a game. A game would probably need to bind to some C libraries but I don't see this as a significant contribution.
The original post made the following points:
- Writing a game in Haskell in novel (No. See above.)
- Writing a game in Haskell will generate significant contributions to the wider community. I don't see this.
Furthermore, it trivialised the accomplishments of both the functional programming community and those who really are on the cutting edge of research.
Research in a more general sense of things nobody has done before, and not just publication track research, is a valid use of the term, and as you say yourself makes perfect sense and is well defended.
Heck, there's room even in the web framework field to do something innovative and not just write MVC-in-Haskell again. (Though even Yesod, the most MVC-in-Haskell framework, has some interesting stuff built around the typing system. I can attest that it is as easy to write an app in Yesod with no cross-site-scripting attacks as it is easy to write an app with one in a more traditional framework.) There's already some interesting work going on there and the projects in progress are clearly not fully exploring the space of possibilities.