You can maybe put off the theory of monads, but their machinery hits you fast and early. For example, the meet-and-greet from Learn You A Haskell:

    main = do  
        putStrLn "Hello, what's your name?"  
        name <- getLine  
        putStrLn ("Hey " ++ name ++ ", you rock!")

The monad effectively introduced a separate syntax for declaring variables, which you must use in preference to let/where, and the compiler will emit a gibberish error message if you mix them up. So you must acquire at least a working understanding of monadic syntax before you can write a trivial program.