[Haskell-cafe] Why Perl is more learnable than Haskell

[Mark T.B. Carroll]

Sorry to hear of your struggles. There has been a lot of work lately on
writing Haskell tutorials but there's still a long way to go,
unfortunately, as I discovered when I tried recently to find the
collection of sample code fragments on the wiki that I'm sure are around
somewhere.

I had the advantage of coming to Haskell after already having used ML
and Common Lisp. But, FWIW, I found it worth persevering: I liked a lot
of my legacy Perl scripts more after I ported them to Haskell and now I
use Haskell for the sort of thing I might have used bash or perl for
previously. (For instance, on the way home last night my GPS' NMEA-0183
data was odd enough that I used Haskell to write a simple daemon that
sits between clients and my gpsd and rewrites their conversation;
previously, I'd have used Perl for that.)

Though, it helps if you get on well with Perl. It didn't suit me very
well so I had more motivation to switch than you might. But, now, by
choice, I do use Haskell for the kind of thing I'd have previously used
a short script for instead, so there might still be light at the end of
the tunnel for you.

-- Mark