Preaching to the choir. I hate those languages. If I had to choose between coding C or Haskell for the rest of my life I would definitely choose Haskell.
Would you say these languages are impractical because of their stylistic choice to use operators?
I think people have a preconception that "Haskell is not practical" -- and then anything that they do not find appealing becomes a source of its impracticality. Despite the fact that the same traits are shared with vastly practical languages.
Yes, I do find their use of operators impractical. In particular the pointer syntax drives me up the wall. I never seem to get it right. As does the printf syntax, come to think of it. Why is integers refered to with "%d"? Can't come up with a reason. And dynamically allocating function pointers on the heap (calloc) requires completely batshit insane keyboard manoeuvres. It would have been a lot better if it was typechecked, which is why I would prefer Haskell.
I can vaguely sense somewhere in my memory that <<= and it's ilk are bit shift operators. How am I supposed to know that? Fuck it. It's bad library design.
I like Python. How do you append to aList? Answer: aList.append(anElement). Scala, on the other hand, seems to believe that ":+" is an acceptable append syntax. The compiler won't let me do stupid stuff with it, which is good, but I would prefer it if errors was caught by English-proficiency instead of rote knowledge/the compiler. I think that's a very powerful distinction.
You would prefer errors to be caught by a human needing to exercise their English-proficiency over errors being caught by the compiler? Seriously? That can't actually be what you mean.
Apples and oranges. In situations where Haskell can do the job well enough, I would recommend Haskell over C, because it's just more secure. However, they are still completely different beasts. You use different tools for different purposes. Try Haskell in an embedded environment, for example.
