> This is an oft-repeated criticism of Haskell which I frankly find has no basis. Firstly, symbols are preferred for these kinds of functions precisely because

> This is an oft-repeated criticism of Haskell which I frankly find has no basis. Firstly, symbols are preferred for these kinds of functions precisely because of their ubiquity. Once you're familiar with them (which you almost certainly will quickly become, for the common ones like `>>=`, and `< * >`) they make the code easier to read, not harder, in general. Few would complain about having to write "<" to compare two numbers in most languages, rather than, say, "lessThan", because it's all over the place, and having a symbol for it makes it easier for a developer to read. The same is true for many common combinators in Haskell. There is no "cult-like insistence" on them; it's simply the case that many Haskell developers find them more pleasant to write than named functions. Honestly, the comparison to brainfuck is completely unfounded, and the references to cults and religious fetishes are IMO unnecessarily derisive. My issue, back when I was exploring Haskell, was not so much with the symbols in the standard library (eg, for applicative functors), but with the amount of library authors who thought they needed their own little shitty ASCII DSL.