I think you have to embrace it to appreciate it; Haskell's advantages wouldn't be there without its disadvantages. (Indeed I suspect I'd never have been able to appreciate Haskell if I hadn't learned Scala first, because Scala gave me a path from traditional imperative/OO code to Haskell-like code that doesn't exist in Haskell itself - but now I find myself wishing for a Scala without those things that I at one point needed). Stop worrying about the runtime performance, stop trying to write [previous programming language] in Haskell. Write expressions for the values that you want, then see if the performance is good enough for your use cases (and if not, have a quick go at profiling for common pitfalls rather than immediately jumping to writing it the imperative way); you might be pleasantly surprised (or you might find Haskell is genuinely unsuitable for your use case, though that's pretty rare IME).