> I'm pretty good mathematically, and the syntax is just beautiful to me. Ironically, I think the syntax probably is causing some of your problems here. Haskel

> I'm pretty good mathematically, and the syntax is just beautiful to me. Ironically, I think the syntax probably is causing some of your problems here. Haskell seems to have a problem where the syntax is so dense that simple operations get confusing. And the strong typing pulls a lot of the learning pain up front. You might be better off learning functional programming independently of Haskell's type system to get a feel for how to do it, then come back and get the types correct and learn the advanced tricks. If you want an unsolicited tip; don't bother trying to "understand monads", there isn't much there to understand - they are what they are (it doesn't get much more basic than the Maybe monad). Look at the code that uses monads - they are an answer to being unable to solve problems the imperative way. So the point of a monad is programmers want to write code in a certain way and without monads there would be a monad-shaped hole in the code that needs to be filled. If the code was written in a dynamic imperative style, monads wouldn't be so interesting. A chunk of monads are just obviously necessary and simplifying once you start using ... whatever the Haskell equivalent of a pipe or threading macro is ... and make the mistake of trying to use functions designed for an imperative style.