I think it's a "to each his own" thing. Personally I've always found Haskell's syntax to be distracting. The operators are kind of visually "thick" and the pr

I think it's a "to each his own" thing. Personally I've always found Haskell's syntax to be distracting. The operators are kind of visually "thick" and the prefix/postfix/infix mix obscures the logic for me. Of course, this is because I only barely grok Haskell. If I really knew Haskell I'm sure I wouldn't have an issue with the syntax, but as someone trying to learn about Monads from a category-theoretic perspective, Haskell just ends up confusing me more than the extra annotations provided by its type system can compensate. I found I understood monads a little better after this article, because the Lisp syntax is uniform enough that it disappeared into the background. The lack of type annotation brings some fresh confusion right back in, but that's the cost of using Clojure for this example. Again, all of this is just how my own brain works. Your brain may vary :) An interesting approach would be to try teaching monads with typed Racket. [1] [1] http://docs.racket-lang.org/ts-guide/ http://docs.racket-lang.org/ts-guide/