Ah, yes, the most intelligent people tended to take it up, therefore if I take it up I, too, am intelligent.
That single line in the article encapsulates everything wrong with FP zealots' approach to their advocacy.
Yes you have to be intelligent to understand complex problems and complex solutions. But just because you are intelligent enough to understand a complicated solution, does not mean the solution is "intelligent".
True intelligence is about coming up with solutions where complexity is minimized.
Even though an intelligent person can understand a complicated solution the complexity of a solution strains even the most intelligent programmer. It takes time to ensure yourself that the solution is correct. Whereas with a simple solution that is easy. It takes intelligence to find a solution that is simple and thus easy.
I do tend to find FP does attract people who've really embraced jargon.
FP is a bit like Assembler. The building blocks are very simple. The resulting programs are not. In a more conventional language the building blocks are not so uniform there are many different things you build your program out of. Think COBOL. Not very abstract code at all. But easy to read.
Conventional languages are more like "Domain Specific Languages" where the domain is building business etc. software. FP gives you the full (?) power of mathematics, it is fully general, not domain specific. Yet DSLs are often a better fit for the task at hand.
Kind of like how a faster car in the hands of a less talented driver won't make them faster, but might just cause them to crash? Whereas a talented driver would pick a faster car and actually benefit from it?
Personally I think it's not so much about intelligence or talent, but passion. In think the developers who demonstrates that they've learned and tried more development techniques and styles, that shows a passion and interest towards software development, engineering and comp-sci. That passion is often key to success and long term performance.
There's probably a cutoff between talent and passion, where passion alone probably has some limits, but also where talent alone has limits as well. If you find someone with both though, that's a pretty good sign.
The question is, are talented developers drawn to FP, or is it passionate developers that are? Or those that have both?
And the other question is, can FP make someone more talented? Can it make them more passionate?
You dismiss or disagree, because you don't like the author's attitude?
IMO, the author makes an observation of familiarity bias and resistance to change. These are just how humans in general tend to behave, and it's not unreasonable to think that these factors are in play.
Moreover, there is an overlap between intelligence and curiosity / openness to new experiences.
If someone is not particularly curious about FP, they shouldn't take it personally: nobody is suggesting they're not intelligent-- that's not what's being said here.
Neither of which makes sense when you look at something like Git or Linux, where someone decided to make a whole new thing without dependencies, and it displaced the previous thing, and the people who use it don't need to care what language it was written in.
In the world of programming (and I guess elsewhere, too), there are simply many more aspects at play when "choosing" the programming language than purely how good the language itself is. Easiest example is Javascript were it's simply widespread because it was the only language available in the browser. I recommend again that you watch the video :-).