I find this interesting. Personally, I'm someone with absolutely no technical background. Haskell programmers seem to come from many backgrounds - math, CS, but also backgrounds that don't involve programming, various sciences for instance.
I've personally always found the communities of many less-common, more functional languages (Haskell, R, Clojure, etc...) to be very welcoming to newcomers with little programming experience or non-programming background, although perhaps I could see how it would be less welcoming to someone coming from a C++, Java or C# background.
To really embrace functional programming (and their communities), in many ways you need to discard what you know about imperative programming. Different mindsets. And I've never found functional programmers to be smug or condescending, though they do use terms that don't make sense in other programming languages/paradigms...
I've personally always found the communities of many less-common, more functional languages (Haskell, R, Clojure, etc...) to be very welcoming to newcomers with little programming experience or non-programming background, although perhaps I could see how it would be less welcoming to someone coming from a C++, Java or C# background.
To really embrace functional programming (and their communities), in many ways you need to discard what you know about imperative programming. Different mindsets. And I've never found functional programmers to be smug or condescending, though they do use terms that don't make sense in other programming languages/paradigms...