I have very limited familiarity with Haskell, but I find the syntax pretty clean and readable - I spend most of my time getting my head around functional/lazy/etc semantics, which make my head hurt (in a good way) - that presumably implies that the syntax is successfully exposing those semantics to my poor OO/duck-typing coddled brain.

I suppose these things are a matter of taste as much as anything else. But when people talk about a Haskell program being 'elegant', I never think to myself "what, that mess?"