My first functional language was APL; I later moved from C to Standard ML. I loved Scheme till I realized I was camping, it was getting late, and I needed to build a shelter from Y-shaped twigs. Somehow OCaml never took for me, but reading a few of its source code modules was an efficient crash course for coding in a functional language.
What is the dream that these languages and Haskell aspires to realize? We want to slice computations in arbitrary ways and manipulate the parts as algebra. This dream of many since the first Lisp meets resistance from those who don't love algebra, but one cannot fault the aspiration: Find a way we can all code with more leverage, less effort.
Pretend Haskell is as small as APL or Scheme. Ignore those who scoff at your primitive avoidance of an emerging Haskell pattern.
I highly recommend Simon Marlow's "Parallel and Concurrent Programming in Haskell". I don't know any language that handles parallel as gracefully, and one can read this book without ever seeing an >=> or <=<.