There are few things that seemed more magical to me at first glance than Haskell's point-free style! :) I would explain the difference between Perl magic and S

There are few things that seemed more magical to me at first glance than Haskell's point-free style! :) I would explain the difference between Perl magic and Scala magic as being that Scala magic reduces down to a relatively few simple but flexible rules, whereas Perl magic reduces to a bunch of edge cases and special rules that lack any form of cohesion. Once you learn these rules, reading Scala code becomes very manageable. I found the Haskell code I saw to be clearer because it's type system allows one to omit types much more frequently, its indentation and function declaration style let you avoid a lot of curly braces and parenthesis, it's type class system involved less syntactic ceremony than Scala's implicits, point-free style allows one to omit Scala's underscores, and so on. All of these things added up so that in the end, I felt like Haskell just looked a lot nicer, much more concise and like the math it was trying to express. I'm sure some of the authors of Scalaz could do a much better job than me explaining Haskell's advantages over Scala when writing functional code, since I am by no means a Haskell expert.