This blog post is maybe 10% about monads and 90% dealing with why you can’t have them in rust (no HKTs). I hardly think that’s more approachable…

Is that true though, you can't define a generic monadic interface yes but you can implement the same interface for your data types. That makes it less useful as the post says but still pretty powerful in some cases

It was for me.

What's difficult about Haskell syntax? Or do you mean "it's an issue because it doesn't look like C, Java or Python?".

For me it is indeed the latter. I can glean a lot of interesting stuff from other languages as long as they look a bit familiar. Haskell I usually come to a dead stop pretty quickly.

I've tried to read up on some Haskell basics, but the main issue is I don't have any real incentive to use Haskell, I have other hobbies that are more tempting, so I forget pretty quick.

The Java-ish version of the Functor interface for instance was quite readable to me, ugly or not.

In many ways Haskell (and other languages in the ML family) are LISP with a lot less parentheses.

In which ways?

I don't find lisp syntax confusing either.