Jim Burton wrote:
Speaking as someone who, like you, came to the language recently and for whom many of haskell's outer corners are still confusing, I should firstly say that I can see where you're coming from but that it puzzles me as to why you think things ought to be obvious or why, when something isn't obvious to you, it must be useless? Could the answer be that it will take some time before you understand the motivation for features that don't seem natural to you? You might need some patience and study along with everything else, I know I do (and people have been generous with links to work that explains the motivation). I only say this because you seem, bizarrely, to be suggesting that you could improve things by undoing the work of all these "scary people" as you call them in another post, whilst admitting that you don't understand it.
Haskell 98 does an excellent job of being extremely simple, yet almost unbelievably powerful. Almost every day, I am blown away by how powerful it is. I suppose it just defies belief that you could possibly need even *more* power than is already in the language... and also, as I've mentioned, Haskell being simple is one of the most appealing things about it. I dislike conceptual complexity. Still, it's only my personal opinion, and the decision isn't actually up to me...