> It is a mistake to say that, because of this, language X has a "harder syntax" Yeah, I mostly agree. But I believe there is some objective notion of readabil

> It is a mistake to say that, because of this, language X has a "harder syntax" Yeah, I mostly agree. But I believe there is some objective notion of readability and that syntax can be objectively more or less readable. However, that's only my belief, as we have no objective way to measure readability yet. (There's this wiki article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readability http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readability but as far as I can tell nobody bothered to apply methods mentioned there to code) So, as it's almost impossible to have a meaningful discussion on readability, I don't try to argue that Haskell is or isn't readable at all. However, the fact(? seems intuitive enough, but maybe it's wrong?) that it's easier to associate meaning to words than to abstract symbols and the frequent use of abstract symbols to name things in Haskell makes me argue that Haskell is harder to learn than for example J (btw, J and K use only ASCII characters). But that, too, is open to discussion - one can claim that names like <*> are easier to learn and more precise, because they come without any prior associations in the reader's mind. In the end, the only thing I can say is that for me - probably because of a whole lot of factors and influences - word-based identifiers are easier to learn and use than symbol-based ones. It's entirely possible that a majority of Haskell programmers are different in this regard (and yes, they - as for all languages - are most certainly self-selecting).