[Chris_Newton]

People often complain about the operator-heavy nature of Haskell, but I find that after a while you're familiar with all of the popular operators and they just fade into the background

With the everyday operators that everyone programming Haskell will learn very early, I agree it’s not a significant problem. Familiarity will surely overcome any lack of intuitive meaning very quickly. The same applies if you’re using “made up” operators but they reflect some intuitive syntax or conventional notation in whatever field you’re working in. In all of these cases, having a concise notation for frequently occurring concepts is surely a benefit, other things being equal.

However, as you start to represent more specialised or esoteric concepts, I wonder whether there are diminishing returns and increasing risks. For example, I think it is good general advice that identifiers in code should be pronounceable, but how do you pronounce $$!? For that matter, did I just write a $$! operator and a question mark, or a $$ operator and an informal confusion/sarcasm mark?

Here’s a Stack Overflow discussion I thought was relevant:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7746894/are-there-pronoun...