The point about learning Haskell in particular is that it's a way different different language. It's a single language that gives you exposure to a lot of new ideas: purity, laziness, modern type systems, functors, monads, monoids, etc.
The massive difference though gives people like me, who've never done anything like Haskell before and do not properly comprehend it some real trouble though. It's similar to assembler. At first, you don't understand how the code works, how the logic is implemented, and everything just seems strange. Then you start looking at it as seperate commands to the processor and suddenly you understand. Sudenlly MOV r1,0x90 start: MOV A,#0x04 INC A DJNZ r1,start makes sense to you.
Sorry, I started fantasizing about Assembly again, my actual question was: "If you could find a metaphor that describes how Haskell works with Data, what'd be that metaphor?"
