As for me, I don't like ubiquitous $ everywhere, often I prefer parentheses over $ (this might be due to my Elisp practices), and I like very much dot style. Most uses of "$" are for stupid things like "sin $ 1 + 2" where parentheses would be much more clear. Agree. "$" simplifies visual perception through two factors: I think this does not hold for every single person. 1. we are relieved from counting parentheses This is not big deal if your editor/IDE can highlight parentheses and even better provide commands to jump to opening/closing parenthesis. foo (thInt $ fromIntegral $ c2hsValueInt cexp) (thInt $ fromIntegral $ c2hsValueInt cexp) foo (thInt (fromIntegral (c2hsValueInt cexp))) (thInt (fromIntegral (c2hsValueInt cexp))) Me, I get a blood pressure spike roughy here ---^ Personally, I find hard to read expressions like: someFn $ someOtherFn $ more $ more $ val (someFn . someOtherFn . more . more $ val) seems better for me, but this is also good: someFn (someOtherFn (more (more val))) Parentheses annoys me only when I need to wrap something by parentheses in Emacs with electric-pairs-mode :D