[medler]

> I do not use JS, nor Haskell, daily, but JS is more readable

I’m guessing you do use languages that are very similar to JS. Like a Spanish speaker saying “I don’t speak Italian or Chinese but Italian is way easier.” If you wrote F# every day you would probably find Haskell syntax quite intuitive

[brabel]

I was trying to make the point that no, it's not that at all. But I guess it's a very hard point to make and even though I am convinced that I'm right and this has nothing to do with familiarity, I can't find any serious research showing either way.

I know a dozen languages well. Everyone here thinking it's just ignorance, but that's not the case. There's just no way that, for me, Haskell and similar languages are readable in any sense just because they're more concise. If that was the case Haskell still wouldn't be close to the most readable, but something like APL or Forth would. I've tried for more than 10 years to be like you guys and read a bunch of function compositions without any variable names to be seen, a few monadic operators and think "wow so easy to read"... but no, it's still completely unreadable to me. I guess I am much more a Go person than a Haskell person, and I am happy about that.

[iLemming]

It is a point of familiarity. Just because you've been coding in multiple languages before doesn't necessarily make you "a better programmer" (in the sense that you've developed good instincts to quickly mentally parse different pieces of code) - you could have been using programming languages of similar paradigms. It took me a few months of writing Clojure (niche language) to start seeing things in a different light - I also, just like you, used to think that imperative constructs are more readable and easier to reason about. I was wrong.

There's no such thing as a "Go person" or a "Haskell person"; all programming languages are made up. Nobody has "more natural inclination" for coding one way than another. Just get your ass out of the comfort zone, try learning a new (to you) language - give it a heartfelt attempt to use it - that may change your life.

Just to be clear - I'm not saying Haskell is easy, oh no, not at all. I'm just saying that it stops being so intimidating and weird after a while.