[rubiquity]

Don't blame Haskell, OCaml, etc. here. 90% of that syntax that is in the example is Swift specific and I agree it is cluttered and ugly. Swift would do better to stop trying to be like C/C++ and be more like ML (you can tell the language wants to be like ML, but I'm guessing there are internal politics to make it more C/C++-like for adoption reasons. There's even (or there were) a few design documents hinting at intentionally being C like).

[jlarocco]

I don't think the OP was "blaming" Haskell and OCaml as much as he was blaming the people trying to add Haskell and features and syntax to Swift and C++.

Haskell syntax works great for Haskell, because the whole language has consistent syntax for things like lazy evaluation and lambda functions. The problem is when people try to tack on those features to Swift or C++ and make it work with the ugly syntax from those languages, it ends up making it even uglier.

To me, the sample code looks like a bastardized mix of C++ and Haskell, and it's pretty hard to figure out what it's doing, even in the toy code samples.

[rubiquity]

Great point. Thank you for bringing out the distinction in OP's post.

[gpderetta]

I don't know, it seems to me that at least a few in the core swift team are well known C++ hackers. For example, in addition to Chris Lattner of LLVM fame, David Abrahams, which I believe is still the lead in charge of Swift standard library, was a founding member of Boost and, relevant to this post, (co-)author of Boost.Iterator. Doug Gregor which is also part of swift core team, is also a prominent ex-Booster.

Edit: Doug was of course also the principal author of the failed C++11 Concepts proposal