Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Typelevel Scala is nothing more than a branch on which experiments can happen before pull requests are made in the main branch. The people involved have already contributed fixes, like the following by Miles Sabin, which is huge and will make Scala much better: https://github.com/scala/scala/pull/5102 - so basically we've got here a bunch of people that are extremely productive, working for free for the bettermen…
> This is basically anti-intellectualism, the same kind of attitude that made Trump popular and that encouraged Brexit. > its essence just because we're afraid of big words and the opinions of experts. I think most of the distaste for terms like Monad, is a failure to communicate it's meaning to a lot of people, it reminds me a lot of Enterprise Java terminology with terms like factories, abstract/factories, Bean, ec…
When it comes to Monad et al I'm reminded of this talk by Gilad Bracha. He points out that the function names and type names that stem from category theory are not very good at communicating their intent in programming. (my words) Monad could be named Flatmappable f.i. 'unit' and 'bind' can have more intuïtive names as well.
At the moment I get the impression that as Scala is becoming a safe and productive and widely used tool there are developers moving to more Haskell like pastures within Scala. Perhaps because that kind of programming is required for some specific problems. But quite likely as well because they hope that it will make them stand out as smarter programmers.
Some people may remember the so called "Peters principle". Informally it states that people get promoted until they've reached their level of incompetence.
Similarly some smart developers tend to increase the complexity of their code to keep themselves amused until they're struggling to understand it themselves. Joosts principle. :-)
Edit: the link to the talk https://www.infoq.com/presentations/functional-pros-cons