From the comments, an alternate form of the (.) . (.) operator: foo = fmap fmap fmap Nothing says "welcome to Haskell!" like an inscrutable pile of fmaps. O

From the comments, an alternate form of the (.) . (.) operator: foo = fmap fmap fmap Nothing says "welcome to Haskell!" like an inscrutable pile of fmaps. Oh, pointless style, how beautiful you are. In all seriousness, though, there are a lot of cases where a pointless--er, "point-free"--style is actually clearer and more comprehensible, typically when you're writing functions intended to be used as combinators. Similarly, applicative style sometimes looks a lot cleaner than using do notation.