Author of the article here. I learned to program very young. I was fluent in BASIC as my first language. I couldn't read the slightest bit of C++ when I firs

Author of the article here. I learned to program very young. I was fluent in BASIC as my first language. I couldn't read the slightest bit of C++ when I first exposed to it. The syntax is hugely different because it's optimized for handling features. There are new operators like ++ everywhere. There's crazy template stuff. I couldn't even start to guess at what the various unary * and & operator applications meant. I eventually learned enough C++ to make sense out of those constructs. The reason they show up is that they make sense for operating at the level C++ is intended to operate at. Haskell introduces a lot more new ideas than C++ ever did. It has radically different syntax than C++ because it makes it easy to work at the level Haskell is intended to work at. There is no way in which the code in that article is ugly. It's very simple, very clean code that uses ideas you've never been exposed to, in syntax that reflects those ideas. And I'm glad to have backup from someone else who knows the language in a sibling comment.