IMO I would always rather have syntactic sugar in Haskell, since parse errors are usually not the kind of bugs that one keeps making. If I encounter a parse error, I would probably not write code that leads to the same parse error ever again since there are so few of them I've encountered that I need to keep in mind to avoid.
I remember thinking figuring out the indentation of a where clause was almost impossible in Haskell since I constantly was getting it wrong at first, but now I almost never make a mistake using the where keyword.
I'm not even going to read this because you put the name of a lethal addictive drug in the title.
More than a poor metaphor, that's insensitive to people who are getting clean and have to deal with people who haven't decided to change yet.
That's a s****y drug, and that language is not.
"Narcotic painkillers prolong pain in rats, says CU-Boulder study" (2016) https://www.colorado.edu/today/2016/05/31/narcotic-painkille...