The problem is precisely that too much regularity makes the code harder to scan visually. The irregularity of various delimiters and separators helps to disting

The problem is precisely that too much regularity makes the code harder to scan visually. The irregularity of various delimiters and separators helps to distinguish certain language elements from others. There is power and elegance in syntactic uniformity, but Lisp in particular is hard to read until you train your eye to see through the nest of parentheses, and it's hard to write without something like Paredit assisting you. Meanwhile I don't think anyone finds Haskell/ML syntax hard to read. The problem is more that, with idiomatic Haskell in particular, too much abstraction, currying, and un-descriptive variable names can obfuscate what a piece of code actually does.