Be careful with this kind of thing. You're inadvertently making the FP community look bad. A more constructive and less pushy approach would have been to recommend an enjoyable FP language and explain why you think it suits the parent.
I think the tongue out smiley face means they were playfully joking.
Lots of functional languages are just as warty as Objective-C, said the Smalltalker of over 10 years who also does Objective-C and is currently using Clojure.
I personally prefer Obj-C over almost all the fp languages I've tried. Clojure and Scala being the two big ones but I've also spent a little time with haskel and erlang. I don't hate them but feel like I'm being handicapped instead of helped. Scala was my favorite since I could do either oo or fp. They are all just tools and I shouldn't be limited.
Does APL count?
Or you know, he did, but none has as a nice set of libraries and UI stuff as Cocoa, or a multi-billion dollar app market.