I think it took me a couple of weeks to be able to write practical programs (i.e. actual useful things) and a month or two more to feel really comfortable with

I think it took me a couple of weeks to be able to write practical programs (i.e. actual useful things) and a month or two more to feel really comfortable with it. I was not pursuing it on anything close to a full-time basis. I recommend this tutorial: http://cglab.ca/~abeinges/blah/too-many-lists/book/ http://cglab.ca/~abeinges/blah/too-many-lists/book/ for helping to grok the memory model. I tried to implement each chapter's data structure before I read the chapter so that I would really understand what problem the introduced memory constructs were solving. It's definitely not an easy language to learn, but once you get past the memory model stuff I think the learning curve at least gets a little flatter.