I concur with your uneasines about operators, I often find them used "too often" in Haskell, I have been a Clojure/Scheme guy in the past. But: For Functors an

I concur with your uneasines about operators, I often find them used "too often" in Haskell, I have been a Clojure/Scheme guy in the past. But: For Functors and Applicatives for example, they do make sense. If you are using them, you can use them in any program you write. Just like we found addition and multiplication with numbers build an abelian group and chose to represent these operations by "+" and "-" (with the difference that in Haskell Programs, Functor-capable data structures pop up everywhere). So that being sad about the motivational level, I would like to address some of your arguments against operators on the syntax level. Precendence can be a problem and obviously it is something that is and has to be learned and might confuse beginners. Nevertheless, Haskell's typechecker will often tell you when you missed up. I started of parenthesizing the hell out of these expressions and let hlint tell me when I could remove the parens, after a few days I hardly made any of these mistakes anymore. While - as a Lisp guy - i do prefer functions over operators quite a bit, it is not like it is a terribly difficult thing. People have committed to learn inheritance, and multiple inheritance. Write classes where the hold and manage a lot of state and let that state interact, etc. That stuff is magnitudes more complicated than Haskell operators, already on a conceptional level.