[solomonb]

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.