[dragonwriter]

> It doesn't matter how good you are in [insert almost any common language], you'll really struggle to understand that code.

To the extent that true, it's because of the weird historic moment between the mid 1990s and now where essentially every industrially popular general purpose language is from the C branch of the Algol family.

It's not really the whitespace (which is clear in semantics), and other than the lambda slash and the infix ticks, the whole thing is pretty clear from a Lisp background. (Well, I'm familiar enough with Haskell now that I'm not filtering it through some other language, but the similarity to Lisp is what helped it start to click early on for me, even though it's an ML descendant and not a Lisp descendant.)

We're actually starting to see more gains for non-Algol descended general purpose languages, so maybe the syntax shyness of the last generation or so of programmers will soon be a thing of the past, because knowing multiple languages won't so invariably be knowing multiple members of the same syntax family.

[jsjohnst]

If you removed the middle paragraph, I'd wholeheartedly agree everything you said. Unfortunately I don't feel my prior Lisp experience helped me as much when I was starting off in Haskell as it apparently did you.