[exdsq]

In Haskell you’d use pattern matching guards for the empty list which works better for recursion & doesn’t require you to handle the Maybe monad in primitive data structures.

Even though Monads were introduced to programming after Haskell had been written (to deal with IO, SPJ and Wadler have a good paper on this) I don’t know if this would have been worth changing. After all, you can always wrap a custom Maybe<List> if you need it!

[dundarious]

OP is saying the existence of head means someone will use it and get the paper cut. It's true you just shouldn't use it (even when you know it's non-empty, write the throw yourself). But that's why it's an annoyance. Arguably it's even more of a problem, it's a "foot gun". It would be nice if the Prelude was just replaced, but that obviously presents a host of annoying challenges. Several alternative Preludes exist, but none appear to be becoming the new center of mass.

[codeflo]

True, but I think enabling more cases where you can use function composition instead of pattern matching and explicit recursion would be a win.