Perl is a large, ugly, messy language filled with quirks and eccentricities, while Haskell is an extremely elegant language whose design is guided by a few overriding ideas. (Or so I'm told.) Based on this one would think that it would be much easier to learn Haskell than to learn Perl, but my experience is exactly the opposite. I've been wanting to learn Haskell for years, literally, but it has been a case of Sisyphus and the Rock. Despite my efforts, I never get to the level of expertise that would make Haskell useful to me. (I don't need elegant factorial or Fibonacci functions in my everyday work.) Sooner or later life intervenes: big project due, long trip abroad, etc., and when I finally return to learning Haskell, I have forgotten almost everything I learned and I have to start all over again. (BTW, I've heard similar stories from many wannabe Haskell programmers.) Arguably, this experience means that I have no business learning Haskell, because it's just not relevant to my work. Maybe so, but I still cling to the fanciful notion that if I knew Haskell well enough, I would find plenty of stuff to do with it in my daily work... Anyway, in contrast to my struggle with Haskell, I learned Perl incrementally over the years, by using it in daily little projects, ranging at first from command-line snippets to 100-line self-contained scripts, and moving on to larger, hairier projects. This daily reinforcement of the little bits of Perl I was picking up was crucial to my being able to retain it and move forward. Perhaps Haskell will never lend itself to something like a Perl one-liner, but still I wish that there were books on Haskell that focused on making Haskell useful to the learner as quickly as possible... If such already exist and I've missed it, please let me know. Or I can always wait until I retire; then I'll probably have a sufficiently long stretch of free time in my hands (barring any operations, strokes, heart attacks, hip fractures, etc.). I bet I could start a Haskell Wannabes Club at the nursing home... kj -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Why-Perl-is-more-learnable-than-Haskell-tf3559193.html... Sent from the Haskell - Haskell-Cafe mailing list archive at Nabble.com.