I'm not quite sure how you're defining "general" and "specific", but I think I don't disagree with what you're saying. The point of my comment was more that on

I'm not quite sure how you're defining "general" and "specific", but I think I don't disagree with what you're saying. The point of my comment was more that one of the beauties of Haskell is that positional arguments are made so elegant because every positional argument is accompanied by a type. I wasn't making a statement about the order of parameters themselves, but how all parameters are typed. > In the case of elem, both orders are reasonable, but often times only one makes sense and then it is easy to remember. In some languages where callbacks taking positional arguments are idiomatic (like Javascript), untyped functions can cause a lot of problems by making it really hard to discern/remember what gets passed in where. In Haskell, there's often very little onus on the developer to remember anything at all; the type system will make sure they got the order right. Obvious exceptions are non-associative functions of the type a -> a -> a Then, one might have to check to see what goes in first and what goes in second.