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Comment by jpfr | Hacker News Reader

These are the exact same complaints of students learning to program for the first time.

Have you tried functional programmng? Lisp? Ocaml? The complaints of newbie functional programmers are also nearly the same.

The "struggle" is necessary. If there is no struggle, there is no learning of fundamentally new approaches you are not yet comfortable with.

See it as part of the training regimen that lets people emerge as stronger programmers on the other side.

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No, the training material for something like Python is orders of magnitude easier to get into than things like OCaml, Haskell, and Lisp. Python has doc and many many books taking you from A through Z. Many of these other languages have "A" and then pick back up at "S", but skip over "B"-"R". You basically get a feel for syntax, control flow, and a few other topics, but don't get the meat of why that language is different. Not everyone wants to learn by digging into open source projects.

If it is something that OCaml, Haskell and Lisp are not lacking, it is books written about them. We can argue on technical points. But the existence of documentation is a non-issue for all of these languages.

https://ocaml.org/learn/books.html

https://wiki.haskell.org/Books

http://lisp-lang.org/books/

It could well be, that these books are written for experienced programmers who don't need basic concepts (control flow, object orientation, etc.) explained. But that was not the point.

The absence of an easy road for these langauges is because they need to teach some powerful abstractions first that have no equivalence in Python, Java or C.

There are books yes and I've read some of them mostly cover to cover (1 Haskell, 1 F# and 3 common lisp) and still can't proficiently use any of those. Yes there are some things you have to learn like macros, currying, monads. I fully agree with you on that, but feel the task could be much simpler with better intro material. Perhaps the shear amount of material failing to work for so many people is a 100% indication that you're correct and the hurdle can't be made easier to overcome...I don't know. Slightly off-topic, if you're correct...do you ever think FP will take off with the masses?

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