Hi Michael, oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.
The seeds of your confusion are very evident from your message. How to back you out of whatever deep rabbit-hole you've managed to get your head into?
> ... Your average reader (already a programmer) would be better served by a comparative approach: Here's how to say something in a couple of other programming languages, here's how to say something roughly equivalent in Haskell -- BUT, here's how it's subtly different in Haskell.
No. Just no. Haskell is not "subtly different" to (say) Java in the way that C++ or C# are different. (I'll leave others to judge how subtly different they are.)
Haskell is dramatically and fundamentally different. You can't just 'translate' an algorithm from OOP to Haskell. Many newbies try, and there's many tales of woe on StackOverflow. Just No.
I really don't know how you could have got any experience with Haskell and say "subtly".
I suggest you unlearn everything you think you know about Haskell, and strike out in an entirely different direction. The best approach would be to spend a few days playing with lambda calculus. (That's what I did before tackling Haskell.)
> (I've actually been curtly informed on the beginners' list -- yes, the beginner' list! -- that my problems of comprehension can be solved simply: "Learn lambda calculus.")
Lambda calculus is an excellent place for beginners to start. What could be easier to learn? It's certainly easier than grokking a Turing machine; and much easier than Haskell: less than a handful of primitives yet can compute anything computable.
> And since the concepts are seldom described in concrete enough and time-honored programming language terms (by comparison to other programming languages)
I'm guessing that the concepts you're talking of simply don't correspond to anything in time-honoured (procedural) programming. Anybody writing about Haskell (including anybody writing the User Guide) assumes a base level of understanding of Haskell. You've clearly veered off the track and haven't yet reached base. Remember the User Guide builds on top of the Language Report.
(On the point of 'time-honoured': lambda calculus is almost exactly the same age as Turing machines. The first well-known programming language using lambda-calculus ideas (LISP 1966) is almost exactly the same age as the first OOP language (Simula 1967). Which is the more time-honoured?)
You do have a point that the terminology in Haskell is often mysterious
> [SPJ said] F# had settled on the term "workflow" instead of "monad", and he felt this was wise.
Yes many have yearned for a more warm-and-cuddly term than "monad". But the terminology barrier starts before that.
Haskell typeclasses are not 'classes' in any sense recognisable from OOP. There are no objects, no hidden state, no destructive assignment. We might go back to February 1988 when a strawman for what became typeclasses used OVERLOAD/INSTANCE.
AntC