[msla]

My point is that you don't spend as much time up front if you have fully internalized the way the language wants you to think. It took me a while to reach some kind of plateau in Haskell, and now I can simply compose working code at the REPL and build programs iteratively like how I can in Python and Lisp where, previously, I had to think hard about monads and types to get anything done.

It's hard to see the riddle some people would find in Python because we're all experienced programmers and imperative languages like Python were what we all started out on. For us, the riddle coming into them was learning how to program at all, so we didn't see the concepts we hadn't mastered as arbitrary stumbling blocks getting in the way of this new language being normal.