I had one semester of Haskell in school and thought I knew a thing or two about it. The last thing I attempted in Haskell was the game of blackjack. The two big problems there were user input, and the random numbers that were used to shuffle the deck of cards. Very quickly I had to combine two monads in my code to get anything going and I found it very confusing. It seemed like my entire program had become tainted with the non functional aspects. The tutorials didn't really clear things up either, I'm trying Scala now and that at least seems like it will let me pull in the functional pieces where I can use them.