If that's true, that's such a disappointment. I always thought of Haskell as the pinnacle of mathematical discipline in programming (though too hard for me to wrap my head around!).

Oh sir we call that "operational semantics"

Hmm, isn't this the definition? 10.3 of https://www.haskell.org/onlinereport/haskell2010/haskellch10...

> The effect of layout is specified in this section by describing how to add braces and semicolons to a laid-out program.

I wasn't going to actually read that in detail to see if it makes any sense, though, but it looks very detailed :).

Nothing forces it to be messy. A well-tended haskell codebase is great. On the oposite, I would say that a poor haskell codebase is painful, but far from being as painful as a poor java/js codebase.

Anecdotally, in my years of haskell at separate places, I had to debug/repl maybe had to repl once or twice. I wish I could say that of mycurrent java gig.

I've written Haskell code in production and I still find the syntax the most eloquent. And you don't have to know the indentation rules, you just pick them up from usage. Just like you don't have to know the grammar rules.

That's because real-world Haskell tends to not be idiomatic, and it involves a lot of directly telling GHC what to do. Mathematicians don't have to (and rarely, if ever) make efficient code. GHC is a really advanced and impressive compiler, but that really doesn't amount to much. At some point the language just devolves into understanding what arcane compiler internals you need to invoke, and it's more like a bunch of C macros with a fancy runtime.

Maybe it's because I code Python professionally, or because I use an autoformatter (ormolu) for Haskell, but I have literally never had an issue with the indentation rules.