I agree, except that I think Haskell would be pretty big in an alternative universe where everybody already learns programming with Haskell. That is, in the dyn

I agree, except that I think Haskell would be pretty big in an alternative universe where everybody already learns programming with Haskell. That is, in the dynamic system of software development, default-to-imperative and default-to-pure-functional are both stable equilibria. As far as monads go, the things that helped me was (1) think of writing in monads not as programming in an imperative language, but as writing a functional program that returns an imperative program (as a value in a rather opaque type), and (2) forget about do-notations and learn about using the arrow-like operators directly.