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Seeing APIs that look like: Chart.Line(data) |> Chart.WithTitle("smth") |> ... ...makes anyone say "yuck" and avoiding F# for any exploratory work. And even after you understand how the pipe operator works and how useful it can be in other contexts . I mean, ugh... Even putting up with superfluous verbosity like `List.Map(myList)` instead of a `map(myList, ...)` or `myList.map(...)` because "that's how F#/OCaml does…
I'm... confused what you're upset about. Are you upset about the leading "Chart?" This is very, very easy stuff for functional programming. Most of the people I know in ML, talented ML folks doing data science within the org I work for to do exciting things... they actually aren't huge fans of the way Python does things. They're huge fans of the libraries Python has to speed up ML work. F# has a real lack there (surp…
No, avoiding unnecessary repetition (god damn DRY at the syntax level) and avoiding visual noise is not arbitrary. It's just good practical taste. I don't live in houses where doors have 2 knobs that need to be pressed at the same time to open a door. And I don't eat steak with a fork that has a knife as a handle. Both of those could work and make sense for some, but overall they are bad taste and awkward for 99% of people.
Python gets it right. Ruby gets it right. Julia gets it right. Most lisps get it right etc. (Even Java and C# get them "as right as they could" considering all their history and past choices that seriously limited what kinds of languages they could be.)
And my issue is that I like the semantics of languages like F# and OCaml and Haskell after having played a bit with them but by god, they couldn't have chosen more infuriating syntaxes and name resolution systems or module systems or tools for them... like they tried as hard as they could to piss off "the plebs in the industry" who actually care about syntax and other such little details, because, ya know, when what you're developing is not that interesting, you should at least have the pleasure of writing code that you aesthetically enjoy to read! And it's hard to convince fellow industry plebs of the usefulness of advanced type systems when the first code sample they see elicits an "ugh" or "yuck" reaction. Most of us programmers are shallow and lazy and we should be proud of this and build tools that cater to our "virtues".
Or maybe I'm in the minority by liking dense and non-repetitive notations and finding them easier to read too...