Solving LinkedIn Queens Using Haskell

I think it's helpful to separate out the "Haskell is imposing" from "This language that I don't know is imposing". It is unrealistic to expect to be able to read a language you don't know. It is easy to be accidentally trained otherwise, because there are several languages out there that are hardly different from each other except in unimportant details and in a perfect world perhaps we wouldn't need both of them, and if you work with a couple of them you might get used to being able to read across languages, but those are really the exceptions rather than the rule. Even if they are very, very large and popular exceptions.

I won't say this reduces the "Haskell is imposing" to zero, but a non-trivial amount of the initial impression of imposingness is just the very different syntax, such as the way functions are not called with parentheses after the function name. But the different syntax isn't really that big a deal. You just don't know it and aren't used to it. Under the hood it does have some differences, but the differences are magnified when you try to swallow the surface differences and the deep differences all in one shot. Nobody who knows Haskell did that; they learned it the same way you learn any other language, one bit at a time.