I thought the more prevalent attitude was "speak to developers like the wretched ignorant peasants they are." followed closely by "A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what's the problem?".

There is a difference between blog posts and conversations about Haskell. The community is extremely friendly to beginners, but many blog posts are not, and most are largely geared towards experts familiar with the more esoteric terms. If you actually answer the "what's the problem?", explain your trouble, you will, with extremely high certainty, get explanations from people that are neither condescending nor deliberately obtuse.

Anecdote: I was at a dinner with Simon Peyton Jones once, and he was about as nice and kind and polite as could be, despite me not holding a candle to him in the computer science field. He was genuinely curious about my job as a consultant "in the trenches", selling coding time for money. I came away extremely impressed with him as a person. Hopefully some of that attitude gets passed on throughout that community.

SPJ is certainly a bodhisattva.

The Haskell community is very friendly in general (same with OCaml). You will find a few "I figured out how to open a file in Haskell, therefore I am smarter than John Carmack" types, but they're not prevalent.

Related: I literally bought a book to try to help wrap my head around the mathy ideas in Haskell (recommended by someone here, I believe). I am about to start it: http://books.google.com/books/about/A_Book_of_Abstract_Algeb...

That said, if you have to understand a sufficient amount of math concepts to code in a language... that's an impediment. (Perhaps an empowering learning curve, to be sure.)