> The $ operator is definitely confusing in Haskell

I generally think of it as a sort of open-ended parentheses that encloses the rest of the line. Instead of a backward pipe. It means "evaluate everything after this character first then apply the preceding function to it" just like parentheses would.

    print $ even $ 4 * 2

is equivalent to

    print ( even ( 4 * 2 ))