Comment by trealira

From the point of view of writing a parser, Haskell's whitespace syntax seems like a hack. So, the grammar is defined with braces and semicolons, and to implement significant whitespace, the lexer inserts opening braces and semicolons at the start of each line according to some layout rules. That's not the hacky part; what makes it a hack is that to insert closing braces, the lexer inserts a closing brace when the parser signals an error. You can read about it here [0].

Also, on an aesthetic level, I think a lot of infix operators are kind of ugly. Examples include (<$>), ($), and (<*>). I think Haskell has too many infix operators. This is probably a result of allowing user-definable operators. I do like how you can turn functions into infix operators using backticks, though (e.g. "f x y" can be written as "x `f` y").

[0]: https://amelia.how/posts/parsing-layout.html