[yetanotherphd]

I found Haskell was not that hard. But I did try to learn by reading Learn You a Haskell twice and gave up.

When I really learnt it, I treated it like I would any other language: I tried to write nontrivial programs in it, in my case the 2048 game. I learnt Monads by adding real randomness to the game.

So I would say the main problem with Haskell is that people treat it like something special, and not like any other language.