I don't deny that there's value in having someone with no experience with the language be able to make some reasonable guesses about what the code does. It's ha

I don't deny that there's value in having someone with no experience with the language be able to make some reasonable guesses about what the code does. It's hard to argue that this could ever be a bad thing. At the same time, I think it's less valuable than it might seem. A vague, cursory understanding is enough in this case to get a gist of what's happening, but it's not enough to actually work with the code, except via luck. The intuition you describe works okay in this case, but it would fail somewhat spectacularly in other cases, for instance with the non-determinism of the list monad.