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Comment by tikhonj | Hacker News Reader

In Haskell you could actually just do

    adder = (+)

because operators are just normal functions which happen to be infix by default. I think this is great--it's consistent, flexible and elegant at the same time. Not treating operators as something special makes the language simpler.

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And to me that means absolutely nothing at first glance. It's much harder to read because I have to do all the work of translating it into the first example myself, and I have to do it when I was presumably trying to figure out what the code means. By the time I do I could have just written it that way in the first place.

The difference in style is similar to how the invention of punctuation, spaces, capitalization and paragraphs made writing much easier to read, and shorthand is annoying as all get out. It is certainly possible to misuse punctuation, spacing and paragraph breaks to the point where they make writing harder to read, but most often the writing wouldn't be good without them either.

What about the currying in the previous example? It made a function that had some value of X pre-bound to the addition operation, requiring only 1 operand/argument when called.

Functions are curried by default in Haskell.

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