This book was excellent for helping me learn Haskell, but the gendered language and fat-shaming jokes made me feel very uncomfortable, eg:
"You're fat! Lose some weight, fatty!","You're supposedly normal. Pffft, I bet you're ugly!" and "You're a whale, congratulations!", "Sure, we could just type them all out but obviously that's not a solution for gentlemen who demand excellence from their programming languages."
You're absolutely right, as a transfat HAES advocate genderqueer, I feel extremely triggered by the author's fat-phobic and gender-normative oppression. The author needs to check his privileges and rephrase to:
"You're healthy at every size! Continue being body positive, healthy!", "You're supposed normal. Pfft, society has an unrealistic standard of beauty!" and "You're absolutely perfect with no flaws, defects, or relevant analogies that can be made, congratulations!", "Sure, we could just type them all out but obviously that's not a solution for genderfluid feministia who demand equality from all xer programming languages."
It's a shame this got downvoted in the backlash. Almost everyone has something they'd find offensive if it were put non sequitur in some technical resource they were reading. It's very possible to be lighthearted without being needlessly offensive. Things that the majority would find offensive basically become invisible and unquestioned norms, but when the majority has to consider that other people have touchy topics too, they'd rather just fall back on the invisible norms than consider points of view they simply don't feel like considering. It's telling that you mostly have glib remarks, dismissals, and downvotes instead of any real counterargument.
Clearly the author is going for a casual, conversational, jocular attitude. That's part of what makes LYAH so approachable. If you want dry, sanitized, bowdlerized instruction, LYAH is not the place to look.
It's possible to communicate in a casual, conversational, and humorous manner without alienating minorities and delivering insults, and the author chose not to.
I think it's unlikely that he was trying to be malicious and is probably just not sensitive to what it's like to be on the receiving end of some of his examples.
While I respect your sensibility, I would have made the same kind of remarks without thinking it would hurt someone. I understand it could, but it wouldn't have been my intent. Also remember that your position is very very US-centric. But I am all for communication : explain your point to the author and propose something else that is as funny as the current text.
But saying the author chose not to is simply dishonest.
If we're talking about motives and proof, then The fact that you understand what you said is harmful and you choose to do it anyway is the legal definition of intent.
Its never been possible to be humorous without content that would alienate someone; nowadays, its just that communication is more ubiquitous so you're more likely to reach that person and hear back from them.
It seems as though individuals who don't want to feel bad about their weight and gender might also feel that LYAH is not the place to look.
I guess LYAH and I just aren't a good "culture fit."
It's a real shame too -- without these completely unnecessary comments that add no value, this is an excellent way to learn Haskell! I've become comfortable with my whale-like properties and I'm male, so I had the lovely privilege of learning from this particular resource. It would be great if people not in my position could too.
Maybe the author did some research and determined that the added "humor" and "casual attitude" engages more readers than it turns away. I'd still want to know the demographics of both groups involved, because I suspect one of the groups looks a lot like me and the other does not.
I feel like some time in the 90s, people got this idea in their head that their sensitivities should be everyone's problem. Since you exhibit this, can you explain why? I'm super curious.
Because for most of the cases people really care about, it's easier for you to change your language then it is for every offended person to not feel upset when you offend them.
This might not be the case if there's a downside to the alternative language, or if the feeling of offense is unreasonable, but this is a decision you should actively make, not passively dismiss as "not my problem".
In this case, I think the language could easily have been changed without significantly weakening the text.
That's a pretty common feeling, and one that I certainly had as I entered college. What finally changed my mind was four years of gender studies classes.
So let me do my best to provide something of an explanation. It isn't really a problem that there's one tutorial or one website that pokes fun at weight issues or assumes it is serving a primarily male audience. The problem comes when those tropes become universal, or at least fairly wide-spread.
Sexual harassment might be a good place to look for examples. A single sexual comment or a single locker-room butt-tap, in most cases, is not that big a deal. But these small acts don't happen in isolation! They happen in a context that has structurally disadvantaged[1] entire classes of individuals (predominately women, in this case). And no, these acts are not the only thing that created such a structure, but they work to make individuals in those classes feel uncomfortable, threatened, and generally unsafe. That's why you'll often hear such acts called "micro-oppressions." And they don't just make their victims feel bad. They also teach the privileged class that the victims belong to a class that it is OK to denigrate. No, not on their own, not in isolation, but in combination and spread over enough time.
As an upper-middle class, cis white male who dates women, I didn't really buy this argument until I had a very particular experience. I was at my university's gym using a cardio machine, and some very muscular athletes were lifting weights behind me. I had forgotten my earbuds that day, so I could hear what they were saying. Mostly, they talked about women and parties. But eventually, they started talking about how all the "non-athletes" on campus really hurt the aesthetics of the place. "Especially those CS majors with their screen-tans," I recall one saying. This turned into a myriad of jokes that I felt were absolutely directed at me personally. They commented how "tech types" only show up to the gym to do cardio and always wear "ridiculous T-shirts with company logos on them," which, at the time, I was. I tried to ignore it, to just have "tough skin," but as they kept talking it slowly wore me down. I left, took a shower, and headed to the computer lab and had a great conversation about Golang.
Now imagine you didn't have a computer lab to go to. That no matter where you went, you had to hear those comments and those jokes. Every time you went to work, you'd hear it from your boss. Every time you turned on the TV, you'd see it in ads and in sitcoms. On billboards, on the street, in movies, and even in programming language tutorials.
Further, imagine that if you were to ever speak up and talked about what was making you uncomfortable, you'd be told to "grow tougher skin" or "just learn to take a joke". Personally, I can't even imagine what it must be like to live life as one of the classes that America structurally oppresses. But I feel like it must suck. A lot.
So what can we do? Well, we start shifting the culture. We start creating safe spaces. We hold people accountable for their comments and jokes while understanding that they didn't mean any harm. We educate and explain.
But most importantly, and I cannot stress this enough, we need to listen. We need to listen to people when they tell us that we are doing something that bothers them. We need to understand how our actions transform spaces that we love -- like functional programming -- into hostile areas for so many people. Because honestly, if we don't listen, we won't know. The author of LYAH isn't a bad person. Those athletes weren't bad people. No one does this sort of thing intentionally.
Yet we have to take responsibility. We have to learn, we have to get better. And the only way to start doing that is to make everyone's sensitivities our problem.
edit --
Perhaps I'm wrong. I'm open to that possibility. I'm the product of a very liberal gender studies education from a university in Arizona, where there were plenty of examples of undeniable xenophobia and homophobia. After all, if the sum of our experiences doesn't fully constitute us, it certainly plays a big role.
[1] It is very difficult to argue that this isn't the case, considering the wealth disparity amongst men and women, especially in the tech industry. If you've got yourself deeply rooted in some sort of MRA thing, then just think about race instead. Wealth disparity between white and black men is pretty wide.
"You're fat! Lose some weight, fatty!","You're supposedly normal. Pffft, I bet you're ugly!" and "You're a whale, congratulations!", "Sure, we could just type them all out but obviously that's not a solution for gentlemen who demand excellence from their programming languages."