Also, Haskell is something of a soup of DSL-operators that require one spend significant time researching what they mean and what behaviour they induce. Even with such knowledge, it suffers from the Perl-ish woe of write-once and read-never.
> it suffers from the Perl-ish woe of write-once and read-never.
My experience with Haskell is opposite, I think Haskell yields very maintainable code that is largely self documenting and allows me to confidently hack around old code bases.
My experience with Perl is the same. Very hard to read back, maintain or get productive on old code bases.
In defense of Haskell, the situation is similar in Scala. I think some people just prefer inventing their own operators instead of using descriptive names.
> This is an infix alias for cons. > This is an infix alias for snoc. > A convenient infix (flipped) version of toListOf. > An infix version of itoListOf.
And a lot of them are (<+~) and friends.
Requiring domain-specific knowledge of symbolic notation is not a trait of self-documenting languages. Recommending that the API search engine be open alongside or within your editor is likewise not a trait of self-documenting languages.
Self-documenting languages are coherent at-a-glance to average programmers with little to no knowledge of the language. Haskell is not this.