[dbpatterson]

I think it's a little bit of both. Yes, Haskell code is often quite terse, but the more important thing is that the type system allows abstraction to a much higher degree than in languages with weaker type systems. Abstraction always takes skill, but in Haskell usually once you come up with the abstractions, the type system allows you to (pretty easily and) safely use them.

[brandonbloom]

    the type system allows abstraction to a much higher degree than in languages with weaker type systems

That may be true, but that's simply irrelevant in this case. The type system is not being used in [1] for any interesting searches (proofs, return type polymorphism, overload resolution, etc) here outside of the most trivial of polymorphic literals. Every standard library function in use here works practically identically in any functional language, including dynamic ones such as Clojure.

https://github.com/gregorulm/h2048/blob/master/h2048.hs