Comment by dawidloubser

I guess the more succinct the code, the more the reliance on understanding what a function actually does - either through experience, or by reading the docs. The words function is simply:

  words :: String -> [String]

So that

  words "foo bar baz"
  -- Produces: ["foo","bar","baz"]

In my experience, both the blessing and the curse of Haskell's incredible succinct expressiveness is that, like other specialised languages - for example using latin for succinctly-expressed legal terms - you need a strong understanding of the language and its standard library - similar to the library of commonly used "legal terms" in law circles - to participate meaningfully.

Haskell, and languages like Go (which anybody with a bit of programming experience can easily follow) have very different goals.

Like many in this discussion, I too have developed a love/hate thing with Haskell. But boy, are the good parts good ...