alt Hacker NewsI don't mean to sound elitist, but in a way, Haskell's difficulty is kind of the point of the language.
The thing that's so elegant about Haskell is that it allows you to express programmatic constructs at a very abstract level. Abstraction is almost by definition difficult to grasp. That's why it takes a decade and a half for (most) people to go from arithmetic to calculus.
Difficulty is most certainly not the point. Abstraction, composability, yes, but difficulty is a language smell that CAN be fixed. (I love Haskell and it's my primary langauge, so this comes from a place of love).