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Comment by wtracy | Hacker News Reader

Haskell has a ridiculous number of obscure operators. Here's a list of "common surprising" operators in Haskell:

https://haskell-lang.org/tutorial/operators

I don't think it makes sense to characterize Haskell as "big" on this basis, because 1) it is trivial to define an operator in Haskell, so there's bound to be a lot of them and 2) even the "standard" operators typically have a simple definition (e.g. https://www.stackage.org/haddock/lts-12.9/base-4.11.1.0/src/...).

Even if the operators themselves don't count as "part of the language", the complex precedence rules around them certainly should.

In what way? Those are defined as part of the operator. I usually parenthesize them anyway just like I would for an equation.

On the whole, I consider user-defined infix operators to be a huge mistake. While the few common ones are great, the ability for every single library creator to add their own infix operator turns into a mess in the long run.

They fine inside a limited domain-specific scope, just don't go importing operators from many libs willy-nilly.

It’s very hard to convince people to keep them in that limited scope.

Those are mostly library functions, not part of the language.

It doesn't seem any more reasonable to use them to declare Haskell a complex language than it would to have the existence of, say, a linear algebra library providing mathematical operators for Forth mean that Forth is a complex language.

Depends on what library they're from.

Is the STL part of C++? Sure, it's a library, but it's a standard library - it should be there in every conforming implementation. Personally, I think of that as part of the language.

Is some vendor's RS232-port-handling library part of C++? I would say no.

In the same way, I think that Java's standard library is part of the language, and is in fact the strongest selling point of Java.

I agree that this is one of the things that makes Haskell harder/scarier to learn, but I don't think that it makes it bigger.

Those are part of the standard library rather than the language itself though. You can (and a lot of people do) define and use your own standard library instead (hmmm... maybe a rabbit hole of its own? Although it seems companies with legitimate business needs do this as well so who knows).

There are just functions.

None of these are remotely obscure unless you don't know functional programming.

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