[catnaroek]

> The problem is, functional programming languages are almost always harder to read than other languages. Haskell is the obvious example

There are many legitimate reasons to dislike Haskell, such as being hard to parse mechanically, but being hard to read is not one of them.

> F# and other languages ML-style syntax are probably the easiest to read.

The syntax of ML's module language is pretty complicated. You cannot look at those “where type” (SML) and “with type” (OCaml) clauses and tell me with a straight face that they were meant to be easy to read. This syntax makes translucent ascription harder to read than it ought to be. It is so bad that many[0] people work around it in various ways, like using the combination of generative datatypes and transparent ascription as a poor man's translucent ascription.

As for F#, I would not call it ML-style, precisely due to the inability to express modular abstraction.

[0] Relative to the size of the ML community, of course.