What about this seems anti-intellectual? Anti-intellectualism is not the same as having a decent sense of humor. They're obviously joking around and being a bit irreverent here.
The Haskeller was probably talking about the same 'deep freezing' feature that they mentioned above, right? Except it already has a name...immutability. But even as they were joking, the Ruby folks assumed it was some obscure theoretical feature that they didn't have any use for.
They're after true immutability for threading and optimization reasons. They recognize it has a value. I get the feeling this is them joking about giving their Haskell friends a hard time, in response to said friends giving them a hard time. Some standard friendly back-and-forth tongue-in-cheek language snobbery.
Ruby makes a piss poor Haskell. For one, it's not Haskell - for two, it's not even trying to be Haskell. Even if Ruby fully embraces the joys and wonder of full immutability and pure functional programming now, the cat is out of the bag - there's a ton of mutable procedural impure code out there in Ruby. It simply wasn't built on pure functional programming and immutability as first principles in the same way that Haskell was. Ruby is a language that lets you, at runtime, monkey patch classes with new methods or new variations to old methods - letting you mutate constructs (methods, types, etc.) that in most other languages are immutable after and even during compilation. If you want Ruby to be Haskell, you're going to be disappointed. Fortunately Ruby still makes a pretty good Ruby.
This is in no way saying Haskell is a bad language, just that you should use Haskell if you want Haskell, and Ruby if you want Ruby. This is also in no way saying that Haskell concepts can't be borrowed, stolen, and brought over to Ruby - just that doing so will not turn Ruby into Haskell, no matter how much one might wish it.
