> There are, for example, plenty of highly productive Perl and Haskell programmers. Those languages are notorious for the gobs of arcane syntax.
I don't see anything arcane about Haskell's syntax. There are no surprises in vanilla\* Haskell syntax - no cruft in the syntax of expressions, no complicated syntactic sugar, you can see what is and isn't an infix function at a glance, same with type constructors (capital letters), etc.
What might be arcane is some peoples use of user-defined infix operators. But I don't know if I would lump that in with ''Haskell's syntax'', since that isn't part of the grammar of the language. But YMV.
\* I can't speak for GHC extensions or template Haskell
I don't see anything arcane about Haskell's syntax. There are no surprises in vanilla\* Haskell syntax - no cruft in the syntax of expressions, no complicated syntactic sugar, you can see what is and isn't an infix function at a glance, same with type constructors (capital letters), etc.
What might be arcane is some peoples use of user-defined infix operators. But I don't know if I would lump that in with ''Haskell's syntax'', since that isn't part of the grammar of the language. But YMV.
\* I can't speak for GHC extensions or template Haskell