[ryanplant-au]

I learnt more about Haskell in ten days of using Elm than I would have in another ten days of studying Haskell, personally.

I think Elm makes a better introduction to FP concepts because there's much less you have to absorb before you reach the point where you can start practicing by doing useful work. Obviously part of that is the fact that Elm removes or hides certain things Haskell has, but an even bigger reason is that you can just say "...and then 'main' returns the HTML element or Html.program that actually gets displayed" and not have to go down the road of IO actions, functors, etc. You can stop at that point and start making working useful applications while getting comfortable with immutability, purity, the type system, and control flow and iteration under those constraints.

Learning Haskell first, you don't have that opportunity to stop and start practicing. You need to move on an understand at least IO actions, functors, applicatives, typeclasses, and other higher-level concepts before you can construct even a simple practice project. Dreaming up a coherent program structure/flow in this weird new immutable and pure world seems hard enough to a beginner without also having to understand how applicative functors fit into the equation. Having that opportunity to stop and stretch your legs by actually doing a project is a major help to a lot of people, that's what makes all the difference. And then 95% of what you've learned transfers directly into Haskell.