On 4/11/07, kynn
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 trying to learn Haskell for some time also, and I've learnt lots of various other languages in the past. I think one of the biggest problems is if there is a considerable learning curve, which Haskell undoubtedly has, there's a nagging question in the back of your head while you try and get a simple task accomplished in an unfamiliar language - "why am I bothering with this, I could do it in 5 minutes in Perl/Python/Ruby/...!". And for many simple tasks Perl is a really good fit - it's best to find a task that plays to Haskell's strengths so you get a bit of positive reinforcement while you work. I have been working with Parsec to do some parsing recently and I can definitely recommend it. I don't think I've used such a capable and easy to use parsing framework in any language and it's really kept me going with Haskell where I might have "just done it in Python" in the past.