Well, I thought about saying that with Haskell, it was semantics at least as much as syntax. By that, I meant what you meant, but I also meant more: I wonder if functional programming itself is a poor match to the way that most programmers think, and not just because they are untrained on FP.

But I didn't say that, because I thought it was a bit of a digression to my point, which was already a digression on phkahler's point, and the digressing has to end somewhere...

It's all good. I've rather enjoyed reading the responses. IMHO this type of thing is what really makes languages appealing or not too different people.