I love the concept and idea behind Haskell, and even reading this piece was very cool. But as much as I can sort of guess at what's happening, the steps being taken to simplify the original pseudocode still seem like some kind of space magic.

I see stuff like "Learn you a Haskell" and whatnot, but it all seems so theoretical compared to, say, writing a web server or parsing CSV or building a programming language with Haskell. I get monads. But I don't get how to bridge the gap between my knowledge and what I see here.

How have other people gotten to this point?