[coolsunglasses]

>To be clear I am not complaining.

Oh sure, I didn't figure you were. I just wanted (other) people to understand that, yes, we're aware of the friction and difficulties and that we're working on it.

>I think the difficulty is a rite of passage to become a functional programmer

Hum. There's some place and purpose for this, such as with professional fields like law and medicine. I'm not sure add'l difficulty beyond what is essential to understanding the material is valuable except as a historic social "glue" for embattled/relatively small programming language communities like Haskell and ML.

>I am sure your book will be a great help and is much needed.

We hope so and believe it'll be an improvement. We've been testing the material pretty aggressively with people completely new to programming. We're going to start testing with people that already code but don't know FP soon.

If the book sells well enough, we've got follow-up books in mind (4+ in the queue).