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Comment by eterps | Hacker News Reader

To be honest, after having learned other FP languages like OCaml/ReScript, F#, Elixir, Gleam and Elm, I still find Haskell baffling. Not necessarily writing it, but I find reading someone else's Haskell code insanely difficult. It will take many more years before I get comfortable with that.

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I agree. I'm quite experienced with FP, but I find Haskell hard, or at least impractical. Not necessarily because of abstractions, but some design choices make programs hard to read for no good reasons.

> but I find reading someone else's Haskell code insanely difficult.

It's true for expert Haskellers as well.

Not to mention large parts of the community using a pointfree, single character variable naming style that's hard to read. If Haskell could consistently be written in a more predictable style, that would be much more suited to collaboration IMO.

> Not to mention large parts of the community using a pointfree, single character variable naming style that's hard to read.

Actually most of the community calls point-free "pointless".

I know because I actually like point-free and noticed that became a minority opinion over the years.

My experience with real world Haskell has been it is more often too verbose in the style of Java to avoid confirming the "Haskellers use single letter variables everywhere" misconception.

> but some design choices make programs hard to read for no good reasons.

Can you give some examples? I may be able to use it in future Haskell writings or teaching new hires.

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