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.
Your attitude is one I see too often in the FP community, and well-meaning or not it holds us all back.
Again, what do you propose I do about it? Should I never say anything positive about anything, lest I offend someone who had a bad experience?
>Your attitude is one I see too often in the FP community
Which attitude is that? Optimism?
Well if you can't understand why your phrasing turns a positive idea into making somebody feel bad, probably.
> Which attitude is that? Optimism?
A version of it, yes. The "if you don't find it easy you are the problem" attitude.
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.
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.
If (when) I ever learn enough to talk about why OCaml is better in detail, it will be with concrete examples not buzzword bingo :)