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Comment by ashleyw | Hacker News Reader

I really didn't like some of his examples (especially the part containing 'longer_than_5', that was hideous IMO!) He tried explaining Ruby's simplicity…by using some of the most confusing idioms.

For example:

    array.select &:even?

Is really just:

    array.select{|n| n.even?}

I generally always use the latter. It's just cleaner. I hate overly clever code.

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Which of these Haskell examples do you prefer, then?

    filter even xs

    filter (\x -> even x) xs

Overly clever or confusing to you, idiomatic to others (and vice versa).

The former isn't guessable unless you know special modifier characters. It's also error prone if you typo a single character.

The latter is readable.

That's true, but the modifier character* (not more than one) is consistent: & says "take the named method, call to_proc on it, and pass it in as a block". Since many methods allow blocks to be passed to them, this kind of code is useful and well-understood, I think.

I want to note that the &:even? idiom is only used in the simplest cases.

You're contrasting "not guessable" with "readable." The behavior of Ruby's `||` is not guessable for a lot of people but it's still quite readable if you know the language.

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