actually they don't. many haskellers would prefer to write foo <$> bar <*> baz quux using idiom brackets as, say, (| foo bar (baz quux) |) in any case, th

actually they don't. many haskellers would prefer to write foo <$> bar <*> baz quux using idiom brackets as, say, (| foo bar (baz quux) |) in any case, the problem is that we want a lightweight syntax for a widespread, general purpose abstraction. the former syntax is used since it's an abstraction developed in terms of the language - so only general names and syntax were available. obviously they're hostile to people who haven't learnt them yet, but i'm not sure that java's . or = is any better in that respect. these do cause learners difficulty, since they're so foreign to anything they learnt pefore programming.