This can be a problem in Haskell, where you can find a library using some operator like +>>* that you haven't seen before, imported from one of its 30 odd globally addressed modules, which may just be re-exporting other modules.

Hoogle/google rarely help with such operators, so finding any documentation is often an exercise in frustration, scanning through library after library for one declaration.

How does Hoogle not help with such operators? Hoogle can search over all packages in the Stackage package set and can also be installed locally to look over all the dependencies of your project.

I'm not sure there's a meaningful difference between a strangely shaped operator and a strangely-shaped function. (Indeed they desugar to the same thing, except one is symbolic and one is alphanumeric).

Any decent library will describe the operator in its Haddock documentation, and most will export a named function with the exact same semantics and type.

Hah, you beat me to it.