It worked for me, but I guess (also based on comments here) it depends on personality. I like to learn (work things out) from theory and I generally prefer to l

It worked for me, but I guess (also based on comments here) it depends on personality. I like to learn (work things out) from theory and I generally prefer to learn elegant languages that introduced some concept rather than a watered down version of that concept as it was adopted in more pragmatic languages. Some other people might prefer to be more practical and understand the theory later, and so prefer languages that are more pragmatic before they accept a new paradigm. Haskell, due to its annoying insistence on pure functions, made functional programming click for me. I have seen functional style in impure languages before (Common Lisp) but I didn't have the discipline to really code that way - I only saw the downsides. Haskell forced that discipline on me, so I could also see the upsides. One significant upside is that one is forced to make functions really small, which leads to more readable and composable code.