I taught myself Haskell to an intermediate level a few years ago, and I think you're touching on the truth here. Haskell is hard to learn, or at least it was f

I taught myself Haskell to an intermediate level a few years ago, and I think you're touching on the truth here. Haskell is hard to learn, or at least it was for me. There is a whole laundry list of concepts I had never even heard of that I had to understand before I could do anything real with the language. Some were apparently dead simple yet frustratingly abstract (e.g. Monoids). Some were intuitive but still took time to grok (e.g. list manipulation stuff). Some twisted my brain into knots and only yielded to persistent study and practice (e.g. monads with threaded state). As I was working through all these "basics", I was constantly frustrated trying to write simple programs. I don't recall whether I blamed it on a lack of beginner-friendly documentation or not, but slowly it all started to resolve into a coherent picture and once I could consistently read and understand real-world types I found that the available documentation was almost always enough for me to quickly understand an interface and how to proceed in using it. I think both sides of this debate are partly right. Haskell's learning curve seems to keep going up as far as you want to climb, and some of the stuff at the intermediate level IMO could really use more examples and documentation, or at least that was my opinion when I was looking at it a year or so ago. One good example might be Template Haskell, which pissed me off to no end every time I tried to use it even in very simple applications. It involves a lot of new syntax and concepts and IIRC had literally no documentation besides what Haddock gives you for free. On the other hand, I think a lot of people criticize Haskell's documentation without knowing the language well enough to make use of said docs or even understand how they might be useful. IMO it's unrealistic to expect every module and library to provide documentation specifically for beginners who don't understand challenging yet ubiquitous concepts (like state monads, to use your example), and I don't think other languages necessarily do a better job at this, but Haskell is just so darn tricky to get your head around that the "total beginner" phase lasts way longer than it might in e.g. Python. For beginners who do want to learn about the core concepts of the language, I found that there was plenty of material to help me on my journey: Real World Haskell, LYAH, the IRC channel, and the internet full of blog posts, to name just a few. I don't mean for this comment to cause offense, or to belittle anyone. I'm certainly not an expert Haskell programmer, and there is much that I still don't understand about it. I just wanted to share some insights I've had learning it and using it in some practical applications.