In my opinion, Haskell community was very warm and helpful, and also able to admit shortcomings.
This was before Stack Overflow reshaped the landscape. On Freenode, ##java was a pretty hostile place (having to deal with people asking to do homework for them or being overall clueless) with attitude "if you see a problem with Java, the problem is you". The culture was so toxic that "forces of evil" ended up stealing the channel from under its original founder and banning him.
On #haskell, you would be immersed in polite chat revealing the development in all things FP, plus even pretty stupid questions were answered in such way that they enlightened both the asking person and bywatchers.
Also they had quite a few awesome bots that let anyone practically develop directly in IRC.
> In my opinion, Haskell community was very warm and helpful, and also able to admit shortcomings.
I just wanted to second this. On a whim, I started attending various community events in/around NYC a few years ago, knowing next to nothing about the language, and found _everyone_ (no exaggeration) I interacted with, saw present, etc. to be welcoming, helpful and encouraging.
This was before Stack Overflow reshaped the landscape. On Freenode, ##java was a pretty hostile place (having to deal with people asking to do homework for them or being overall clueless) with attitude "if you see a problem with Java, the problem is you". The culture was so toxic that "forces of evil" ended up stealing the channel from under its original founder and banning him.
On #haskell, you would be immersed in polite chat revealing the development in all things FP, plus even pretty stupid questions were answered in such way that they enlightened both the asking person and bywatchers.
Also they had quite a few awesome bots that let anyone practically develop directly in IRC.