Do you seriously believe that if xmonad had been written in anything else (and perhaps by anyone else) HN and proggit still would have been inundated with as many posts about it as they were? Please. It was rediculously obvious to anyone (or at least it should have been) what was going on.
"The VERY first time I ran it - up popped a timeseries visualization. Mind. Blown!"
Almost every programmer using almost every language has experiences like this. That hardly justifies making such expansive claims, claims that even a dependently-typed language would have difficulty justifying.
"Since then I've worked at hedge funds and investment banks in python and built a startup on Haskell. My opinion is built on my own direct experience, and I find it somewhat disrespectful that you dismiss it as "drinking the Haskell Kool-Aid"
I am not trying to be disrespectful to you, but I think you are being far to charitable in your interpretation of the conduct of your peers in the Haskell community.
> I am not trying to be disrespectful to you, but I think you are being far to charitable in your interpretation of the conduct of your peers in the Haskell community.
This is probably where the disconnect lies. It seems like boothead is operating under the principle of charity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity). HN's guidelines don't specifically mention it but seem like they have this principle in mind. You have absolutely no evidence that dons actually "marshaled his supporters to spam" and accusations that he did are not very charitable (as you yourself admit). It's just as likely that some people got really excited about it and posted it to HN.
I operate under the principle of common sense. Why so many posts about a tiling window manager, and why xmonad and not i3, ratpoison, or dwm? Because it was written in Haskell and was thus being used as a vehicle to aggressively (if ineffectively) push the language on people. As for dons, he's posted plenty of xmonad crap here and on proggit, where he also happens to be a mod.
Ok, you don't like XMonad or Haskell, fine. I use XMonad daily. It has a giant pile of contributed modules, it's extremely flexible and used by a reasonable amount of people. I can give you one reason for not i3, ratpoison or dwm: as far as I know, they are all manual tiling WM (no notion of "master" window like XMonad). They're still tiling WMs, but of a different breed.
I think it's undeniable that a substantial portion of the interest in XMonad came about because it's written in Haskell, but that's very different from saying that all of the interest in it comes from a concerted propaganda campaign on the part of the Haskell community.
"The VERY first time I ran it - up popped a timeseries visualization. Mind. Blown!"
Almost every programmer using almost every language has experiences like this. That hardly justifies making such expansive claims, claims that even a dependently-typed language would have difficulty justifying.
"Since then I've worked at hedge funds and investment banks in python and built a startup on Haskell. My opinion is built on my own direct experience, and I find it somewhat disrespectful that you dismiss it as "drinking the Haskell Kool-Aid"
I am not trying to be disrespectful to you, but I think you are being far to charitable in your interpretation of the conduct of your peers in the Haskell community.