> My conclusion is that there are major, well-justified reasons for why people strongly dislike functional languages.

Personally, I hate type systems. I mean, I tolerate them, but >90% of the benefit I get is via better auto-complete (an possibly better performance).

Functional languages (that aren't lisp derived*) all seem to love complicated type systems. And in these systems, at some point I experience the same abstraction collapse as I do in a java code-base when I have to sift through 87 layers of interfaces and sub-classes.

I'm also, self-admittedly, a devotee of the New Jersey style of design, and consider usefulness to be much more important than correctness.

*The lisp ones are kinda fun, but I always end up back in dirty-old common lisp where I can do crazy do* shenanigans instead of functional lisp land.