[Haskell-cafe] Point-free style (Was: Things to avoid)

[Jan-Willem Maessen]

On Feb 10, 2005, at 6:50 AM, Henning Thielemann wrote:
> On Thu, 10 Feb 2005, [ISO-8859-1] Thomas Jäger wrote:
>> Altogether, the spirit of the page seems to be "use as little
>> syntactic sugar as possible" which maybe appropriate if it is aimed at
>> newbies, who often overuse syntactic sugar (do-notation).
>
> This overuse is what I observed and what I like to reduce. There are 
> many
> people advocating Haskell just because of the sugar, which let 
> interested
> people fail to see what's essential for Haskell. When someone says to 
> me
> that there is a new language which I should know of because it supports
> definition of infix operators and list comprehension, I shake my head 
> and
> wonder why he don't simply stick to Perl, Python, C++ or whatever.

If you're trying to avoid obscurity, why advocate point-free style?

I ask this question to be deliberately provocative; I'm not trying to 
single you out in particular.  So, to everybody: What's so great about 
point-free style?

Is it really clear or obvious what

 > map . (+)

means?  Contrast this with

 > \n -> map (+n)

or

 > \n xs -> map (+n) xs

I submit that, while it is possible to develop a reading knowledge of 
point-free style, non-trivial use of point-free 
computations---compositions of functions with arity greater than 1, as 
above, compositions of sections of composition or application, arrow 
notation without the sugar, and so forth---will always be more 
difficult to read and understand than the direct version.  I submit 
that this is true even if one is familiar with point-free programming 
and skilled in its use.
Even something as simple as eta-reduction (as in the second and third 
functions above) can seriously obscure the meaning of program code by 
concealing the natural arity of a function.

-Jan-Willem Maessen