The audience is going to meet the article where they're at.
It's fine for, say, a blog post aimed at Haskellers to assume Haskell knowledge, but when posted on a board largely consisting of people without Haskell knowledge, it's natural that you're going to get at least a few people saying, "hey, I don't understand this".
But I'll be honest - I'm familiar with Haskell and the ML module system and the underlying concept (that typeclasses and modules are roughly equivalent in some sense), but I'm unfamiliar with Backpack so I still struggled to follow it a little. The target audience is an extremely narrow niche. So I think it's just somewhat poorly written; it doesn't feel like the author really had an audience in mind, other than themselves. There's probably ways of writing this - without spending too much time regurgitating the basics - that would be more palatable to more people.
> The audience is going to meet the article where they're at.
I hear you on this point but anyone can post anything on this forum. The burden should not be on the author to write a post that aligns with whatever forum their blog might get posted onto.
The author is free to ignore any and all complaints they consider unfounded. It’s not even like the author is recieving any complaints personally; they have to come here to see any. And if they come here, they will get to read the viewpoint visible from here.
Bingo- post to hn ... you'll get per review. Thats the deal.
Death? cryOfUprising? Why be weird? Is the article supposed to communicate something or is it an entry in the author's personal diary that got out? Sheesh. ... I know language profs try hard to teach people to write. It wouldn't kill to listen.