I tried learn programming since I was 11. First I played around with graphical programming in Game Maker, Construct and RPG Maker. Later I tried out VBasic but quickly felt it was boring. After that I bought K&R and tried learn C, which was way too hard to program games above simple parsers and text adventure. After that I played around a little bit with Python and Scheme. It never got too interesting since I wasen't able to write any "real" programs. Later, when I was 15, I got invited to a private IRC network of cool and friendly programmers. One guy did a Haskell course and sent the slides from the lecture to me. I did some exercises with it and everything I didn't understood I looked up in LYAH and RWH. After I was able to complete all exercises, which by the way was very simple ones, I started reading Write Yourself a Scheme in 48 Hours. It told me how more about the practical use of monads, I learned how to use external libraries (Parsec in this case), and basically how you design a program from scratch. After that I tried to implement macros for it but failed, I wrote a simple IRC bot that used my Scheme implementation to evaluate expressions, I wrote a simple blog powered by Scotty and Blaze-HTML. Now I'm contributing to a recently released game engine which utilizes FRP, written some really small games with it and have contributed a little bit of code.

What I think made Haskell stick was that it was fun and easy to start write "real" programs with. :-)