[mxavier]

I'm having a hard time understanding the intent behind "You shouldn't need to know Haskell". Do you mean in order to complete the tutorial and understand what Yesod does? That's probably true. Being someone who's been studying and using Haskell in personal projects for the past maybe 10 months or so, Haskell's syntax and fundamental design decisions (while spot on, in my book) are different enough from most programmers' skill sets that I don't think they'll make it very far writing a non-trivial Yesod app without knowing Haskell. I'm fairly proficient/enamored with Haskell now but I'm certain I would have crashed and burned if I got my start trying to learn Haskell from Yesod.

My first dose of Haskell was attempting to write an XMonad config. That turned out to be a frustrating, several hour long ordeal for me that had me write off Haskell as undecipherable, alien hieroglyphics for quite some time after that. I'd urge anyone reading the tutorial who likes what they see to put in the hard time to get a handle on the language, understand what its good for and what it isn't and then return to web programming with it.

[yogsototh]

I am sorry if I didn't made it clearer. Of course, you don't need to know Haskell to follow this tutorial in particular.

But it is clear in my mind, you must know Haskell to do something useful with it. And in particular, make a web application, even if using a web framework.

As you stated, Haskell is not a language you could learn in 3 hours like I learned the bases of Python. It takes a very long time to learn, particularly when you're not used to functional programming.

But an intent of this tutorial was to promote Haskell. Clearly, if someone want to do something a bit more useful, he will very soon realize he must understand Haskell.

I added a specific advice in my conclusion similar to yours and pointing some essential resources.

[JoshTriplett]

Many people saw Ruby for the first time when they looked at a Rails tutorial. Many people see Python for the first time when they look at a Django tutorial. In both cases, you'd still need to learn more about the language to do something useful. I think the disclaimer "You shouldn't need to know Haskell" just means that the same thing works for this tutorial: you don't need to have seen Haskell before going through the tutorial, because you'll learn enough to follow the tutorial, even though you'll need to learn more later.