I think you're being kind of mean. I love Forth, Lisp, and Python, and I'd encourage people prejudiced against them to give them more of a chance, but I can also understand how a language can just rub you the wrong way. (Personal example: Go. It has a lot to like pragmatically, but it wants you to code in a particular style. I'd rather code in mine.)
The thing is I can see tremendous value in both Forth and Lisp in terms of the semantics, but in some cases we just have to accept that people favour different styles and cross-fertilise the ideas rather than try to make people use the same languages.
One of my old pet peeves that I wish I had time to pursue was to experiment with a language that tried to separate presentation from the semantic model - I know there has been other attempts. I wish that got more attention. It's a tremendously hard thing to get right without ending up hampering communication more than you enable it, but the need for high fidelity interchange of programs is one of the biggest barriers to more rapidly iterating on improvements to the presentation of code.
You can't design a language with Haskell's semantics and Ruby's syntax. So if you want to use Haskell, you just have to get over your dislike of the syntax. It has a beauty of its own, but you'll never see it until you get familiar with it.
> You can't design a language with Haskell's semantics and Ruby's syntax.
Not identical of course, no, but same style would not be a problem. There's nothing in Haskells grammar that can't easily be adapted to a less terse style. It wouldn't solve all issus I have with Haskell by far, but it would go a long way to make me consider it readable.
> but you'll never see it until you get familiar with it.
I am familiar with it. It is how I came to detest the syntax.
I look at it like someone who wants to learn French. Maybe they live in a French-speaking country and have French-speaking friends. When it comes to learning French, they decide they just can't stand the way it is spelled, and immediately give up. Wouldn't that be ridiculous?
Having learned Mandarin, I can tell you that giving up because of the way it is written would be a perfectly sensible thing to do.
However, we are comparing apples and oranges. Learning any language takes years, Mandarin a few more. The syntax of a programming language takes a few days at worst.
When someone invents a programming language where each of 30,000 library methods is a unique character that must be memorized separately, I'll be prepared to grant your point.
