I love the language and worked with it professionally for over a year, but I can’t stand everything around the developer experience and community.
Rust is a breath of fresh air.
That by itself is only a cause. What's the effect, what's the symptom of this attitude, what are the practical observable results? Gatekeeping? Rude forum responses? (I know OCaml partially suffered from that and they can be fairly elitistic; when you ask something fairly normal nowadays like "what's the preferred package manager?" or "how do you build a project?" is sometimes met with smartass responses like "what's a project?")
> I love the language and worked with it professionally for over a year, but I can’t stand everything around the developer experience and community.
Sums up my experience with several development communities, yep. I can relate.
> Rust is a breath of fresh air.
I feel the same, the community is extremely pragmatic. I've met a few a-holes but they were a very, very rare exception. 99% of everyone I interacted with was just like me: they were looking how to get the job done AND write idiomatic and efficient code.
This really depends. I don't care about some abstract notion of a community BUT if I can't get basic stuff done because documentation is not good and the official forum responses are not helpful then yes, I absolutely will abandon the language.
To this day, languages differ a lot. I.e. in Elixir and Rust I can just add dependencies to a file (Rust even allows you to add the dep via a CLI command) and then reference it in your code a minute later, issue a command and your project is compiled and runs and you see the result.
Now ask me how much time I spent fiddling with OCaml's `dune` and `esy` which are a project manager and a dependency manager respectively. Took me an entire weekend to get one simple code to compile with a singular CLI command, and then run it. And community was not helpful: "check the docs", which I did 15 times probably over the course of that same weekend.
To go back to your point, friendly / welcoming community is just a bonus. The community has to be helpful above everything else. Some people are noobs. Some people like myself are senior BUT are unwilling to start over and are just looking for "how to do X and Y without spending a full day?". Some people are trying to make a presentation to advocate for the technology on an internal meeting. Examples abound.
I am not an experienced moderator (nor I ever want to be) but I've witnessed significant differences in how various programming language (or just a framework) communities act, and how helpful they are. It absolutely isn't identical or even close. Some are downright off-putting.
Finally, I make no claims about Haskell in any way except only one thing: when I saw its huge combinatorial explosion of different compilers, I gave up on the spot. Give me 2-3 options and leave the rest to the enthusiasts.
