Does it demonstrate a lack of humility to be honest about how difficult something was for me? I'm sorry my truthful assessment offends you. If humility means pretending things are harder than they are, then I guess I don't have any humility.
Whether we find it offensive or not isn't relevant. Your comments are degrading to those who find it difficult, and you are actively hostile when they complain or we point this out.
Your attitude is one I see too often in the FP community, and well-meaning or not it holds us all back.
You seem kind of hooked up on the "easy for you" part, which really isn't the part anyone cares about. I can't even comprehend how you came to the conclusion that you are being asked to lie.
Maybe a more constructive (humble?) approach would be to show others why it was easy for you, subjective as that may be, and how they can achieve faster comprehension levels based on your own experiences.
I'd like to see examples that start with a Java or JavaScript program, then try to translate them to Haskell and documents the thought-process of figuring out how the Haskell solution is and needs to be different.
Haskell aims to be a terse language, right? That's one reason that makes it difficult to "read" it and if you can't read it it's hard to learn it.
Think about learning to read and write Chinese when all you know is English. The only way to do it is to have a text-book that shows you sentences in both English and Chinese. I don't think it is necessarily "difficult" to learn Chinese, but you need learning materials targeted to an English-speaker.
