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I've been off-and-on smitten by this idea, which I associate mostly with lisp enthusiasts (affectionate), that if you just had the right affordances around abstractions and DSLs programming would be magic after writing Haskell professionally for a few years I'm depressed, systems are too wide

Haskell isn't like this, Haskell has this rigorous, mathematical, "really consciously do a lot of design thinking up front" kind of culture, and Lisp, SmallTalk, and other "weird" languages like FORTH and APL, are the TOTAL OPPOSITE of that!

The goal of these languages is to be able to rapidly iterate, to implement both programs and abstractions very quickly. Ideally that there IS no edit-compile-test cycle because editing and testing and compiling are continuous and intermingled.

This makes lisp kind of the anti-vibecoding—code is everpresent in the thinking process, rather than absent, but they're using different technologies to achive the same goal: raising the level of abstraction to allow for faster prototyping and iteration, more malleable software, at the cost of rigor

eh, I think Haskell admits programming-by-discovery more than that but part of the dream of affordances-and-DSLs is the whole "write your whole program in the REPL" tale that I've heard about re: lisp, and Haskell is not that. (I've dabbled in common lisp and scheme and never found it, though)

So it's not actually make-your-program-in-the-REPL. It's that you write code, reload what you edited, and then interactively test in the REPL. You can build up confidence in your program piece by piece, as you build it (although this can hurt you by disincentivizing formal unit/integration) tests.

i don’t think that’s true, more that people are inclined to take that approach by virtue of what attracted them to the language. you can dynamically type whatever you want or stash evil things behind deferred evaluation if you don’t want to be rigorous.

Yes. What I'm saying is that those values define the affordances of the language and therefore what is easy, what is difficult, and what isn't permitted. The design of a language changes the things you are most likely to write!