If someone had tried to start my programming journey with Haskell I'd likely have given up and not touched programming ever again. God forbid that the function

If someone had tried to start my programming journey with Haskell I'd likely have given up and not touched programming ever again. God forbid that the functional crowd gets their way. Most people are terrible at recursive thinking. That's why those languages have such a reputation for being difficult. The declarative languages are also a good starting point, but the most used one (SQL or spreadsheets) are somewhat orthogonal to what one tries to do with python. You need for loops. You need if statements. You can't just hope that they will get recursion.