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A comment on Teenage Haskell. Parent comment

Re:Teenage Haskell by seanmcdirmid on Saturday June 28, 2014 @05:22AM (#7957816)
But scheme/racket is really not that far off from java compared to Haskell. I've never had a hard time working with it, even though I've never learned it formally (ok, two weeks of LISP a long time ago). Racket never felt weird, and many of its API are OO in everything but name, it's like C# with the same amount of FP abstractions (list comprehensions), and maybe some macros and continuations if you want to do something advanced.

But Haskell really is functional programming, there is no way to accidentally create an easy to use OO-style library. And then there are the monads....

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Re:Teenage Haskell by steveklabnik on Saturday June 28, 2014 @12:03PM (#7958507)
Monads are pretty simple if you aren't pre-emptively primed with "monads are really hard."

I remember the day I sat down, worked through some examples, and grokked monads. I said, "That's it?"

That's not to say that they can't be hard to learn. I just don't think that they're _inherently_ hard to learn, and I think that they're sufficiently different enough from 'more traditional' CS concepts that said other concepts can hamper your ability to learn them. I suggest http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/marktoberdorf/ba... if you're still trying to figure them out.

Fun story: one time I had to suddenly explain monads to an English professor, because she overheard me say the word and said, "wait, Leibnitz?"

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