You feel wrong. There is no such fuzzy. StateT, Compose and WrapMonad are functions. They are just like foo and bar in my example. Just as in a C-style lang

You feel wrong. There is no such fuzzy. StateT, Compose and WrapMonad are functions. They are just like foo and bar in my example. Just as in a C-style language you need to know the parens mean function application, in haskell you need to know spaces and ($) are function application, and (.) is function composition. The code is perfectly readable even if you don't know what the functions being used do.