It’s true that things like docs and error messages are also important, but the fundamental task of understanding and reasoning about code is significantly easier if you restrict yourself to pure functions over immutable data.
No, I didn't mean docs and error messages, I meant even more basic things. Like sheer code size, visual noise, and intuitiveness, to give a few examples. There's no free lunch, everything is a tradeoff. Just because you're constraining the program's state space that doesn't imply you're making the code more succinct or intuitive. You could easily be adding a ton of distracting noise or obscuring the core logic with all your awesome static typing.
I think the relative importance of syntax compared to actual semantics when it comes to ease of understanding is probably rather low.
Either way Haskell is also probably the language that lets you produce the most succinct code of anything that could be reasonably be used in production.
> Haskell is also probably the language that lets you produce the most succinct code
It is. Haskell has the low verbosity of scripting languages like Ruby and Python while letting you manage applications that would otherwise be written in high verbosity languages like C++, Java, and Rust.
