[avindroth]

You had to learn 0,1,2,3, etc. at some point. The thing with notation is that it takes time to learn, but it proves profoundly useful over time. The benefit of notation integrated over your career outweighs the adoption costs.

Arabic numbers are like this (no child immediately ‘groks’ Arabic numbers), and Haskell notation is making the same case. Haskell abbreviates abstract structures so that they become fluid.

If focusing on notation is a problem, then we should all have grown up to use our fingers for counting, not Arabic numerals.

[blub]

You have to remember the context in order to understand my reply. Here it is once again "It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilisation advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them."

First of all programming without thinking about it (i.e. instinctively) is arguably not even possible. But let's be generous and assume that it is somehow.

Are you seriously trying to argue that it's possible to program in a complex programming language which not only requires types, but almost requires encoding complex relationships in them without involving the "higher faculties of the brain"? This is such an extraordinary claim that it requires evidence to even consider it.