To the other people saying that pure functional programming is the reason that it's difficult to explain Haskell to other programmers and blaming them for doing too much imperative style coding, it's the wrong assumption. Pure functional programming has nothing to do with the difficulty in explaining Haskell. Pure functional programming is in Lisp/Schema/C#/Clojure/and other languages and people have no trouble learning it.

Haskell is difficult to explain because it has many terms, vocabulary, and syntax that are not familiar to people. It's ML-style syntax doesn't help.

Most tutorials targeting Haskell beginners implicitly assume the readers already know the Haskell syntax, terms, definition, etc, and go right ahead to explain the advance concepts like functor, applicative, or monad. It's like teaching them how to fly before they know how to walk, in the Haskell land. No wonder Haskell beginners are frustrated with any of the monad tutorial.

The thing is. Stop. Stop telling beginners what monad is. Just show them the basics in Haskell and get something useful going. Get them to write and use Haskell programs. When the need arise, they will look into what monad is. Programmers have used STL plenty without knowing the internals of C++ templates. Same thing can be done with monad.