My biggest gripe with it is not so much the language itself but the culture: it favours bloated and pompous solutions much in the same way Java/Spring does. Monad Lifting, Lenses, Aspects and FactoryFactories occupy the same space in my head.
I guess I just prefer both the simple side of functional and the simple side of imperative.
I definitely have to give OCaml a try.
My only gripe with them is that there seems to be a culture of having zero type annotations (due to HM), which can make reading other people's code difficult.
I don't think that's quite true.
Ocaml has plenty of advanced features (the module system, GADT, structural typing in the object system) but the community relationship with them is very different than how the Haskell community uses the language. For the most part, the Ocaml community tends to dislike gratuitous complexity and be non dogmatic (I fondly remember a lens library announcement on which the top comment could be boiled down to "just use mutations").
> My only gripe with them is that there seems to be a culture of having zero type annotations (due to HM), which can make reading other people's code difficult.
Interfaces tend to be annotated (mli files) but usually people rely on the tooling to know types inside files. Merlin is a blessing. It is a very fast type-checker which keeps working on incorrect files.
I should put some more time in with OCaml, Merlin sounds nice.
Don't worry then, that's fine, you just dislike Haskell.
I personally really like functional programming but can't stand Haskell. The style favoured by the community is optimised to be the most impenetrable possible.
You should try Ocaml. The preferred style favours piping to point-free and uses monads sparingly. Currying is everywhere but copious use of named arguments tends to make things simpler.