While I agree that this is a problem in some sense, I also think it's a rather natural consequence of the primary strengths of Haskell: its focus on mathematica

While I agree that this is a problem in some sense, I also think it's a rather natural consequence of the primary strengths of Haskell: its focus on mathematical abstraction; its rational & precise language theory; and its willingness to impose a learning curve and do things differently. The Haskell community has an inofficial motto that reads "avoid success at all costs," from an old presentation by Simon Peyton-Jones. The correct interpretation is "avoid (success at all costs)," that is, don't make decisions for "populistic" reasons, and don't be afraid to take the "high road." Of course, it would be amazing to see much more "practically" oriented teaching material, because as you say there's quite a bit you just have to figure out. But I don't think Haskell is uniquely bad at this. It's just bad in different ways... Documentation for dynamically typed, "pragmatic" things – like jQuery, many Node libraries, etc – often confuses and annoys me, because I'm so used to Haskell's type specifications and clear abstractions. Granted, I've been coding Haskell for years, and went to a university that uses it as the primary language for students, but I think Haskell libraries are often very clear and easy to use. Haskell also has truly excellent frameworks and libraries for things like concurrency and parallellism. Simon Marlow's book is exemplary and wonderful; it should qualify as a very good resource for practicing developers. Yet another point: GHC's type errors can seem obscure for a beginner, and sometimes they're indeed very tricky, but largely, the compiler actually provides loads of helpful information in a clear and well-presented way (searching for contextual info, spell checking, etc). I can't properly express how much I prefer fixing GHC type errors over debugging JavaScript type errors... Honestly, I think the state of teaching programming is not great in general. I remember the Java courses at university... Learning how to use Swing, UML diagrams, sockets... It's kind of a nightmare. But regardless of all of this, it's evident that more and more people are attracted to using Haskell for "real-world" systems, and I believe that Haskell's incubation period as an academic language was utterly crucial to its maturation as a novel and strong technology. (I'm not accusing you of this by any means, but sometimes there's an anti-academic tone in criticisms of Haskell, which I think is completely misguided and frankly dangerous.)