I guess it depends. Maybe for an adult. I learned the rudiments of Atari BASIC when I was seven and the book explained assignment with cartoon pictures of numbers going into boxes. I don’t remember ever being confused about what it meant. You could just try it (oh, X was 7 and now it’s 8, ok). Similarly, control flow wasn’t hard... just follow whichever line number to GOTO next. You could just play with it until it worked. Would seven-year-old me get very far with recursive functions and IO monads? I really don’t think so. So I’ll always have a soft spot for BASIC and how much fun it was. Maybe python in a Jupyter notebook would be a kind of similar experience for today’s kids? But not Haskell.
> Would seven-year-old me get very far with recursive functions and IO monads?
A few years back, there was someone who shared here his experience teaching young kids programming with a simplified/visual Haskell and it was pretty cool. It seems kids without programming preconceptions don't find it all that difficult.
It is interesting to try to think all the way back to the struggles of initially learning and wonder if things that seem difficult now (Haskell, which I know barely anything about) might have made more sense then. I often wonder this about TCL, which looks very weird compared to most languages but is really easy to learn if you remember the "12 rules": https://tcl.tk/man/tcl8.6/TclCmd/Tcl.htm
