Haskell and syntactic complexity

Why isn't if a function in Haskell?

In most languages, if is a special form (or local equivalent). That's because if is lazy in its last two arguments, so it can't be a function in an eager language. But Haskell has no trouble with laziness; if can trivially be a function, with no need for special semantics, let alone syntax. There's even a page on the Haskell Wiki advocating switching to the simple functional if.

All this must have been obvious to the designers of Haskell. So why did they choose the Algolesque if ... then ... else ... syntax instead?

Of course this question has come up before. Paul Hudak, one of the designers, explains:

Dan Doel's answer is closest to the truth:

I imagine the answer is that having the syntax for it looks nicer/is clearer. "if a b c" could be more cryptic than "if a then b else c" for some values of a, b and c.

except that there was also the simple desire to conform to convention here (I don't recall fewer parentheses being a reason for the choice). In considering the alternative, I remember the function "cond" being proposed instead of "if", in deference to Scheme and to avoid confusion with people's expectations regarding "if".

To my eye, if a then b else c improves neither clarity nor familiarity, but evidently the Haskell designers thought otherwise. More interestingly, they didn't think the added syntactic complexity was much of a problem. How can this be? Doesn't Haskell culture value simplicity?

Yes, but not so much simplicity of syntax. I'm misled here by a superficial resemblance between the cultures of Haskell and Lisp. Both cultures are obsessed with mechanically processing code, and therefore want the language core to be as simple as possible. Since a minimal core is impractical to program in, both expect a larger, more useful language to be defined by translation to the core, so its complexity can be mechanically eliminated. And both consider the representation of code as text to be separate, at least in principle, from the core. So at first glance, it seems as if they should have the same attitude to syntactic complexity.

But they treat it quite differently. Lisp's culture considers syntax unimportant, and therefore tries to make it as simple and transparent as possible, so it won't prevent humans from seeing through it — because code is much more interesting than its textual representation. But Haskell's culture considers syntax safely separate from the language core, and is therefore willing to tolerate complexity in it. Since it goes away without inflicting any complexity on the core, why shouldn't it include whatever features are convenient?

This approach has given Haskell one of the prettiest syntaxes in the world, so I can't say it's wrong. It is uncomfortable, though, for a Lisper to see a culture which draws wildly different conclusions from seemingly similar premises. Maybe this is explained by modest differences in degree: Haskell values textual beauty a bit more than Lisp, and code-processing a bit less. Is that enough to explain the difference? I don't know. I don't understand.