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Functional programming is routinely taught to complete beginners. Languages like Scheme or (core) ML are very simple and you can do a lot with surprisingly few

Functional programming is routinely taught to complete beginners. Languages like Scheme or (core) ML are very simple and you can do a lot with surprisingly few constructs. However, Haskell is in a different league in my opinion. If you want to do anything meaningful, you need monads which add some layers of complexity. I consider myself a very experienced OCaml programmer, and I've been working casually for more than a year with Haskell, but I'm still much slower in Haskell. It still happens to me that I need one hour to figure out how to use some monad transformers, or specific API, to do something that would take me 10 minutes in another language. Well, probably I still need more practice, but the learning curve is certainly much higher for Haskell than Python.

agentultra 4y ago
Sure the learning curve demands more but the payoff is worth it. Monads, despite all the tutorials out there, are not that difficult a concept... once you learn it. It's frustrating to teach because of this. Like most things in mathematics it takes some effort to learn and pays off in spades. There are a ton of abstractions you get with learning monads and the rules of how they compose are consistent. It goes a long, long way. I'm better for having gotten through it. Most abstractions in other languages though? Ad-hoc mish-mash of half-baked ideas with no laws and poor specifications. Each one you learn is absolutely useless when moving to the next program. Monads are the same everywhere you go. Just like algebra.