You are missing quite a bit of context on the history of Haskell. From https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/a-history-of-haskell-being-lazy-with

You are missing quite a bit of context on the history of Haskell. From https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/a-history-of-haskell-being-lazy-with-class/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/a-histo... , it seems that Haskell's design did not arise out of Lisp, but out of several languages in the early 80s which were lazy/non-strict and purely functional. Indeed, removing parents ruins the perception of Lisp languages as just another language family, and promotes Lisp into some sort of privileged position. Simultaneously, mistaking Haskell for a Lisp means mistakenly thinking that Haskell has special meaning for pairs over tuples or lists, that Lisps are statically typed or that Haskell is optionally typed, that Haskell has macros, that Haskell's juxtaposition-based application syntax is related to Lisp's parenthesis-based application syntax, and so on. Consider example Lisp memes: "Data is code; code is data," or "all structures are lists." Compare with example ML memes: "If it compiles, it works," or "well-typed programs don't go wrong." Or even better, with Haskell memes: "Laziness leads to purity," "monads are programmable semicolons," "show me your types." The only meme common to these communities is "lambda the ultimate", and you are ignoring decades of Lisp philosophy if you nominate this meme to carry the flag for all of Lisp. When I first read this comment tree, I wondered if everybody had forgotten about the Land of Lisp and the Republic of Haskell: http://www.lisperati.com/landoflisp/panel01.html http://www.lisperati.com/landoflisp/panel01.html I consider Haskell to be an ML, and even then, it's worth remembering that lazy/non-strict MLs have different behavior from the rest of the family.