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by tel 2472 days ago
Point free can totally be abused. It's also, in my opinion, often very useful for clarity.

It's my experience that, especially with FP code, often the important things to write down are the stages/steps in a transformation and that the intermediate outputs do not, by themselves, hold much semantic meaning.

Pointfree lets you write just those steps. Moving to "point-full" coding forces you to give names to these semantically meaningless intermediates. This can sometimes just be noise.

Terseness is also just shocking sometimes. It can take time to get used to it. I feel like when I read more verbose languages I skim each block of code numerous times and collect the meaning iteratively. When I read Haskell, I depend upon each name having distinct and important semantic meaning, I leverage type information heavily, and when I do read something I read each word carefully.

Totally different styles, but I've found strong preference for terseness.