It's interesting to read this comment because I experienced nearly the same thing. Thought I was clever because everyone told me it was so, was admittedly quite

It's interesting to read this comment because I experienced nearly the same thing. Thought I was clever because everyone told me it was so, was admittedly quite arrogant about my technology skills, learned Japanese, moved to Japan, and could barely explain anything to my programming peers at the level of a five year old. It took several years of forced humbleness to erode the arrogance, stop thinking I was so clever, and simply apply myself to the task of learning the necessary Japanese to explain myself correctly. What I generally see with people new to learning Haskell (or similar) is that they approach it with their bag full of imperative language cleverness, and find the concepts and terminology hard to grasp because they refuse to become humble for a bit and examine it as a paradigm different from the one they know. To be fair I was no different until I finally started understanding it, but looking back, learning Haskell was similar to my Japan experience. It became much easier once I buckled down, learned the parts that didn't make sense, and most importantly began applying them.