[thysultan]

It's not functional programming, it's functional languages that go bat shit crazy with the amount of symbols they use that'd make looking at heliographs a refreshing pass time.

[Jtsummers]

Out of curiosity, what are the crazy amounts of symbols present in, say, Erlang, SML, Scheme, or Common Lisp?

[codr7]

Common Lisp is about as functional as modern C++, it's a multi paradigm language by design.

[jhgb]

Well, for example standard Common Lisp defines 978 symbols. ;) At least that's what (length (apropos-list "" "CL")) told me.

[bigbillheck]

Parentheses count as symbols.

[throwaway81523]

We're talking about typed FP so only SML in your list really counts. So let's see: functors, polymorphism, higher-kinded types (does SML have those?), Hindley-Milner type inference, etc. Then for Haskell (the main topic of the linked article), bring in a bunch of unfamiliar algebra such as the notorious monoid on the category of endofunctors. It is actually worth understanding that. I liked this article (prerequisite: some exposure to Haskell):

https://www.haskellforall.com/2012/08/the-category-design-pa...

This is also good:

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell/Category_theory

[epgui]

I think the word you're looking for is "hieroglyph".

[the_only_law]

Not only symbols, I’ve stayed away from Scala because half the libraries I’ve looked at seem to want to make their own little DSL the language.

[erik_seaberg]

That’s the way we ought to be working. If you don’t write the DSL, you’ll have to macro-expand the DSL in your head and write a bunch of boilerplate which everyone will be forced to try to reread and maintain forever.