Whilst it's true that one can program in a functional style in almost any language, I fail to see how javascript would help someone learn about functional programming.
s/Lisp/JavaScript/g
As for those utilities you mention, Javascript is the most broken of them all:
>>> ["10", "10", "10"].map(parseInt)
[10, Nan, 2]
That is precisely the kind of insistence that prevents people from adopting functional languages for real world programming tasks.
JavaScript certainly lacks language level support for function composition, but it has the basic tools to allow you to build combinators and compositional functions yourself, and when dealing with functions as data you often find you can elegantly refactor code by building such a thing - so in terms of 'learning about functional programming' JS can be a great workbench to help procedural minded programmers discover those tools by discovering and building them.
So maybe JS doesn't teach functional programming, but it does at least introduce you to paradigms from which it is possible to see the benefits of a functional language.
Of course, if you then hear that those languages are only for doing math in then you'll stick with JavaScript.
You've misunderstood the GP's point. It's not that FP is about math, it's that you want to emphasize mathematical functions -- functions that don't rely on inputs other than their parameters and return values in a consistent co-domain. This is just good style to improve testability and minimize sources of potential bugs.
Because that's its definition. Change that definition and it becomes meaningless. Functional programming is about working with functions that always have the same output for a given input - the definition of mathematical functions and I wouldn't have to say mathematical if software developers wouldn't feel the need to overload technical terms. Pascal and other languages had great names for pieces of code taking arguments and that aren't functions: procedures, routines, subroutines, etc.
> That is precisely the kind of insistence that prevents people from adopting functional languages for real world programming tasks.
So let me get this straight, in order to get people to adopt something, you want the definition changed in such a way as to become meaningless?
Also, I do expect software developers to know at least high-school level math, because CS is math. Even if you lack a formal education, that's no excuse for ignoring theory that can help in your daily work, especially in this day and age with so many online resources available for free.
If a properly designed method were passed into map it would work fine.
In essence: ["10", "10", "10"].map(Number)