> * ML - includes SML, OCaml, F#, Scala, and Rust Scala and ocaml suffer from the same reputation. SML didn't really make it out of the academia. F# is easier,

> * ML - includes SML, OCaml, F#, Scala, and Rust Scala and ocaml suffer from the same reputation. SML didn't really make it out of the academia. F# is easier, but still has a bad rap from C#ers. Rust is making incredible efforts to be accessible, but the learning curve is still steep. One could say haskell itself is also an offspring of the ML family. In that family, the article author correctly identified that Elm is probably among the most accessible. Choosing a specific application domain enabled the language creators to cut a lot of complexity, and to use a simple state machine as a runtime. > If you ask the question "what is a monad used for?" You'll get the same kind of answers as you'd get you'd get when asking Java programers what this "class" concept is about. The functor-applicative-monad stack is at the heart of Haskell's flavor of functional programming. You can write small programs without it, of course, but it's going to be the same experience as writing Java with a single "main" class.