Haskell has a famously high barrier to entry that has little to do with its type system or functional nature. As a pure lazy language you have to learn a lot of

Haskell has a famously high barrier to entry that has little to do with its type system or functional nature. As a pure lazy language you have to learn a lot of concepts (What does pure mean? What does lazy mean? What is a monad?) before you can be productive. Extending this into intermediate usage is difficult too; how do I begin to combine these monads I now understand? I see your argument. If your aim is to get into functional programming then Elixir/Erlang, even Lisp/Scheme is fine. I don't think it's the functional nature of OCaml and Haskell that make them powerful; I think those parts of the language are great, yes, but the type system (static, algebraic, inferred) is the real secret sauce.