As a fellow haskeller, I agree on that the language has very good abstraction capabilities.
On the specific example in the blog post though I can only say that there are so many times I've been down the clean code path and it's more often not another person, but the future you, into whose foot you are shooting. Abstraction is not beneficial when you need to study it later to understand it again.
> Abstraction is not beneficial when you need to study it later to understand it again.
This is where a good study routine comes in. I study Haskell like I study all things of any long term importance, using an Anki deck. It takes me longer to start using a new abstraction, but once I have it it's pretty much there for life, due to my daily commitment of half an hour or so to my reviews. It makes far less sense, of course, to do this for a one-off abstraction I had to apply to a specific project, so this naturally tilted me over the years to work more and more in loss like Haskell.
(N.B., I do not state this as a prescription. I think this is well above and beyond what most people expect of themselves professionally, and that is okay. Everything in life comes with tradeoffs.)
This is really interesting to me. What exactly do you write on the anki cards? I cannot really image learning a haskell abstraction by mere memorization. How can you learn it without actually applying it to a real problem. Often times the hard part is to know when to use which abstraction. How do you learn this using flashcards?
What you detail is pretty much how you would recognize it. You write out a brief summary of the high level problem, and then ask yourself "which abstraction would you reach for first, absent any other information?"
The latter part is often implied, but it's best to make it explicit. You're trying to build up expert intuition, which means allowing for the fractal nature of software development to mean you might be in the 20% of times where this won't work for you.
On the specific example in the blog post though I can only say that there are so many times I've been down the clean code path and it's more often not another person, but the future you, into whose foot you are shooting. Abstraction is not beneficial when you need to study it later to understand it again.