Grit and determination will get you far but like it or not there is a ton of work that requires knowledge of mathematics and theory that you can't avoid if you want to make good things.
What's kind of neat about Haskell is how closely researchers can work with users and collaborate on solutions.
Remember, the GHC team is pretty small. Their IRC channel isn't huge. Releases still get made fairly regularly and GHC is running one of the most advanced industrial strength programming languages out there with a large ecosystem.
I'm not sure how you gleamed that they aren't important/haven't made important contributions/aren't doing useful work from that comment. Tsoding specifically said that they don't make good tooling, but make great languages. It's not memeing about "Haskell for research," it's talking about things it needs to improve (potentially to break free of that meme).
For what it's worth, C++ tooling also sucks. We've just layered tons of kludges on top of it that make the ecosystem somewhat bearable. It's not ideal, contributing to a project for the first time usually requires some troubleshooting to get a working build.
And I disagree.
Mathematicians aren't building Haskell.
CS Researchers aren't noodling around either. I know a few of the people working on GHC who are researchers and are doing the hard work of improving error messages and reporting because they care deeply about tooling. They are also users after all!
> For what it's worth, C++ tooling also sucks.
Yeah, so does Haskell's. I think it's just an unfortunate fact of life that nothing's going to be perfect.
My point is that the reason for Haskell's situation is less to do with researchers and more to do with funding and organization.
To that effect, the Haskell Foundation is relatively new and gaining steam. It might change. But it's nowhere near the funding levels that get poured into TypeScript and C# or even Java, gcc, etc.
Update: Put it this way, the set of people building Python packaging is probably mostly developers and very few, if any, researchers. The tooling isn't great either. I don't think researchers make bad tooling and programmers make good tooling. I think programmers make stinking bad tooling all the darn time. Programming is hard. Tooling is hard. And programmers are a fickle bunch that are really hard to please.
