What's interesting to notice about this thread is how many messages are just oozing with smug superiority and disdain for anyone who doesn't share their knowledge. Yes, some are from genuinely humble and even-handed FP practicioners, but when we look at people who are vocal about FP, this small example shows around 90% of them in the gatekeeper camp. And the punchline is I don't think they can even see what they've become. This is what adds to the insidiousness of it all: They genuinely believe themselves to be helpful and positive.
This is a huge cultural problem, and one that I've seen many times in other communities over the years.
Take Linux, for example. Nowadays, it's trivial to get up and running with Linux, but it wasn't always so. Back in the 90s the installation was tricky, to say the least. The end user tooling was iffy at best and buggy as hell, there were tons of sharp edges, but most frustrating of all were the gatekeepers. People can handle challenges and pitfalls, but nothing quite takes the wind out of their sails like a smug asshole belittling them when they ask for help or express frustration.
Similarly with video codecs. In the 2000s when video codecs were a new thing, they had so many obscure options that almost nobody knew what would produce a good result, and so the gatekeepers came out of the woodwork to hold the sacred knowledge prisoner. They brought us byzantine software like the appropriately named Gordian Knot, and once again the forums were full of smugness, arrogance, and abuse as people despaired over how the hell to rip their DVDs into something viewable.
And it's similar in the Nix community, and countless others I've observed over the years.
In my experience, gatekeeping goes hand-in-hand with poor tooling and educational resources. The worse the UX, the more gatekeepers it attracts (because gatekeeping fulfills a need they have, so they flock to gatekeeping opportunities). Linux used to require an understanding of init scripts and environment variables and bash and crontabs and kernel recompiling and all sorts of esoteric knowledge just to get started. But now with mature tooling, it's easy to get started and then dig deeper at your leisure via the wealth of newbie friendly articles littering the internet.
I think It's funny. the blog is literally the opposite of gate keeping, trying to get non FP people into FP. Even provides a book, a course, doesn't throw around Math terms and yet your argument is "Well, some FP practitioners are smug and suck, so why bother?"
Elixir is a functional programing language (It's not pure like Haskell or PureScript, but thats besides the point.)
The Elixir community is absolutely awesome! All or welcome.
There are soooo many resources for people to learn FP, the gate keeping thing may have been true ten years ago but I certainly don't think that the case today.
On the other hand, it's really frustrating to explain this kind of things to the most Juniors. Many of them were too confident on their code because "they had everything in their heads" and anything else was like an incoherent and overcomplicated ceremony. "Why do all that when I can do a simple index.js file and add a simple if and that's it?"
There's a catch with FP, where many of their implications impose you to write better code. But it's not mandatory to go the functional way to do that, and I always try to explain the importance of those fundamental principles to other people, and they can try to implement it in whatever style they desire.
But when someone just doesn't want to learn, they always see me with a smug and gatekeeping attitude and I can't help but see them as people that just don't care at all.
Git, Vim and general GUI come to mind, specifically on this site. There is always someone berating individuals for not using shortcuts, not using the console instead of a visual tool, using an IDE, etc. Specifically using Git with a GUI primarily is a great way to get flak from several subreddits, too.
NB: This is not an invitation for discussion on the pros and cons, to berate either preference, or gatekeep.
OMG you just reminded me of waiting outside some 101 class on day one typing on my laptop and this guy asks me what OS I'm running. When I told him "Ubuntu", he snickers and says "Talk to me when you're done playing with a toy"
What's interesting to notice about this thread is how many messages are just oozing with smug superiority and disdain for anyone who doesn't share their knowledge. Yes, some are from genuinely humble and even-handed FP practicioners, but when we look at people who are vocal about FP, this small example shows around 90% of them in the gatekeeper camp. And the punchline is I don't think they can even see what they've become. This is what adds to the insidiousness of it all: They genuinely believe themselves to be helpful and positive.
This is a huge cultural problem, and one that I've seen many times in other communities over the years.
Take Linux, for example. Nowadays, it's trivial to get up and running with Linux, but it wasn't always so. Back in the 90s the installation was tricky, to say the least. The end user tooling was iffy at best and buggy as hell, there were tons of sharp edges, but most frustrating of all were the gatekeepers. People can handle challenges and pitfalls, but nothing quite takes the wind out of their sails like a smug asshole belittling them when they ask for help or express frustration.
Similarly with video codecs. In the 2000s when video codecs were a new thing, they had so many obscure options that almost nobody knew what would produce a good result, and so the gatekeepers came out of the woodwork to hold the sacred knowledge prisoner. They brought us byzantine software like the appropriately named Gordian Knot, and once again the forums were full of smugness, arrogance, and abuse as people despaired over how the hell to rip their DVDs into something viewable.
And it's similar in the Nix community, and countless others I've observed over the years.
In my experience, gatekeeping goes hand-in-hand with poor tooling and educational resources. The worse the UX, the more gatekeepers it attracts (because gatekeeping fulfills a need they have, so they flock to gatekeeping opportunities). Linux used to require an understanding of init scripts and environment variables and bash and crontabs and kernel recompiling and all sorts of esoteric knowledge just to get started. But now with mature tooling, it's easy to get started and then dig deeper at your leisure via the wealth of newbie friendly articles littering the internet.