> reinforce my preconception of them as an insular community elevating arcane jargon to a virtue
I highly recommend not assuming that all "Haskell programmers" agree on what is "superior and readable" code. I also recommend trying to explain "arcane jargon" such as "inheritance", "encapsulation", "method invocation", "recursion", "dependency injection" etc. to people who are not already familiar with such jargon. They might perhaps start believing that you are "an insular person elevating arcane jargon to a virtue"?
Let's compare how Wikipedia starts the definition of a "monad":
"a monad [...] is an endofunctor (a functor mapping a category to itself), together with two natural transformations required to fulfill certain coherence conditions."
vs. "encapsulation":
"Encapsulation [...] is the bundling of data with the methods that operate on that data, or the restricting of direct access to some of an object's components."
Are you seriously going to argue that those concepts are equally arcane to somebody not familiar with the underlying paradigm?
"In functional programming, a monad is a design pattern[1] that allows structuring programs generically while automating away boilerplate code needed by the program logic."
> Are you seriously going to argue that those concepts are equally arcane to somebody not familiar with the underlying paradigm?
Most definitely! I have tried to teach C# to a non-programmer friend of mine and his brain exploded when I tried to teach him about classes. However I have taught a few programmer friends what a Monad is in a few minutes. The problem with the Wikipedia page is that it is correct but targeted at somebody who understands category theory. Which is useless if you just want to learn how to use it in (say) Haskell.
I highly recommend not assuming that all "Haskell programmers" agree on what is "superior and readable" code. I also recommend trying to explain "arcane jargon" such as "inheritance", "encapsulation", "method invocation", "recursion", "dependency injection" etc. to people who are not already familiar with such jargon. They might perhaps start believing that you are "an insular person elevating arcane jargon to a virtue"?