I read that book for 6 months straight, followed all the exercises, and quit when I realized I couldn't write a simple script that did something useful.
But boy did I sure evangelize Haskell throughout the process! facepalm
HPFFP was the book that finally made the language 'click' for me. It took 13 months to complete and only towards the very end did I start to get an understanding of how to structure an actual program larger then a leet code exercise.
Its a _really_ different language from what I was used to (Javascript, Python, Ruby, etc). The book covered a lot of material that felt very basic to me, but interspersed with that was material that covered concepts I had never even considered, this was the case in the early chapters as well as later on.
I found that the early chapters setup lots of concrete examples that later on would be revealed as simplified cases of highly abstract structures that occur all over the place. Uncovering these is a very magical experience. For that reason alone, I tell people to just grind through the book rather then skipping ahead to the more exciting material later on.
But you don't have to like HPFFP or Haskell, nobody has to like anything. For me, Haskell is a joy to use and provides a seemingly never ending source of learning material to explore.
I started building straight away from day 1, getting a decent REST API together is surprisingly easy. You really don't need to understand most of the advanced type level stuff to stay productive.
Maybe you tried to go for too high abstraction level straight off the bat? That can turn out very depressing on Haskell.
Its a _really_ different language from what I was used to (Javascript, Python, Ruby, etc). The book covered a lot of material that felt very basic to me, but interspersed with that was material that covered concepts I had never even considered, this was the case in the early chapters as well as later on.
I found that the early chapters setup lots of concrete examples that later on would be revealed as simplified cases of highly abstract structures that occur all over the place. Uncovering these is a very magical experience. For that reason alone, I tell people to just grind through the book rather then skipping ahead to the more exciting material later on.
But you don't have to like HPFFP or Haskell, nobody has to like anything. For me, Haskell is a joy to use and provides a seemingly never ending source of learning material to explore.