My sense (guess) is that you, like most people, learned programming from the outset using the procedural/imperative style. After this way of thinking and approaching problems became firmly ingrained, you then experienced FP as more abstract or difficult to wrap your brain around. But I don't think this reflects on anything innate to FP. FP is, at its core, far FAR simpler than procedural/imperative/whatever-you-want-to-call-it programming. It requires high school math, if that. Equational reasoning, substitution, etc. The basic concepts get you extremely far and are, in their essence, incredibly simple and straightforward and far less foreign to a newcomer than any of the complicated stuff most people are introduced to programming with. That's one guess. The other is that you don't have a great sense of what FP actually is and most of how you think about it comes from HN conversations or blog posts about parser combinators and monads, etc. To that I would say two things: 1) those concepts AREN'T actually that complicated, they are built upon some very basic concepts, but a firm grasp of them is required. They are taking a few basic concepts and exploiting their usefulness to the nth degree and 2) some of the stuff you see or read that is, I'll admit partially, or can be quite complicated does not represent what FP is at its core and is instead a few nerds who really really enjoy pushing the limits of FP and its style of reasoning. I don't mean this derogatorily, it's great that people are doing that. But a deep knowledge of those more advanced concepts isn't essential to FP which, I argue, is incredibly simple and, indeed, far simpler than the other dominant style of programming. None of this is to say that I think a newcomer who is job-minded should start with FP. Perhaps they shouldn't. I'm only addressing what I think might be a misperception of what FP is or how complicated or abstract it is.