> That's the same situation languages like Factor and even Haskell saw seven years ago. The former is more or less dead and and the latter still never "broke out".
Kind of a nitpick, but "breaking out" was never a goal of the forces behind Haskell, and in fact contrary to their stated desires. Much of Haskell's value was always (and continues to be) its variety of tools for expressing the semantics of the problem the code tries to solve — features which we now see spreading rapidly among mainstream languages. The rest of its value (and its primary purpose) was as a research tool for developing such features. There's still a lot of work to be done in exploring that frontier.
I thought the more prevalent attitude was "speak to developers like the wretched ignorant peasants they are." followed closely by "A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what's the problem?".
There is a difference between blog posts and conversations about Haskell. The community is extremely friendly to beginners, but many blog posts are not, and most are largely geared towards experts familiar with the more esoteric terms. If you actually answer the "what's the problem?", explain your trouble, you will, with extremely high certainty, get explanations from people that are neither condescending nor deliberately obtuse.
Anecdote: I was at a dinner with Simon Peyton Jones once, and he was about as nice and kind and polite as could be, despite me not holding a candle to him in the computer science field. He was genuinely curious about my job as a consultant "in the trenches", selling coding time for money. I came away extremely impressed with him as a person. Hopefully some of that attitude gets passed on throughout that community.
The Haskell community is very friendly in general (same with OCaml). You will find a few "I figured out how to open a file in Haskell, therefore I am smarter than John Carmack" types, but they're not prevalent.
That said, if you have to understand a sufficient amount of math concepts to code in a language... that's an impediment. (Perhaps an empowering learning curve, to be sure.)
Kind of a nitpick, but "breaking out" was never a goal of the forces behind Haskell, and in fact contrary to their stated desires. Much of Haskell's value was always (and continues to be) its variety of tools for expressing the semantics of the problem the code tries to solve — features which we now see spreading rapidly among mainstream languages. The rest of its value (and its primary purpose) was as a research tool for developing such features. There's still a lot of work to be done in exploring that frontier.