And God forbid you make anything that might actually be easy for non-programmers to learn. It will be more or less met with instant and persistent scorn, and it

And God forbid you make anything that might actually be easy for non-programmers to learn. It will be more or less met with instant and persistent scorn, and its users derided and outcast, simply because they didn't use a 'Real Programming Language' like C. Prejudice doesn't seem to have anything to do with it. Functional programmers think differently, and what's obvious to the Functionals isn't to the Statefuls. And the Statefuls are currently most of the world. I've flip-flopped myself, because while I love the elegance of being a Fucntional, being a Stateful is just so much more productive. There are a few reasons for this: If I want to make a game, there's no good functional framework. If I want to write a script to get something done, like download a webpage, my goto language is Python because I know for a fact that their libraries work and that their documentation is almost always stellar. Contrast that with Lisp where you can spend at least a day just getting the environment set up in a way that asdf doesn't hate. Especially on Windows. (Yes, if you want to make games, Windows needs to support your dev environment.) My info about asdf is a couple years out of date, because to be honest I haven't felt inclined to look into it again after some bad experiences. Haskell could be wonderful. Never tried it. Will someday. Until then, I'd love some sort of competition where a Haskell programmer and myself are given a task, like "write a script to X," where X is some real-world relevant task and not an academic puzzle, and see who finishes it first. It would be illuminating, since I'd give myself about a 30% chance of finishing first, but it would reveal what I'm lacking. Arc had potential. It really did. Everyone just gave up on it, and it never attracted the kind of heroic programmers that Clojure did. So the wildcard seems to be Clojure. It's a decent mix of performant, practical, and documented. I'm out of time to pursue this comment further, but the main point is just that FP's problems have very little to do with societal acceptance or scorn. If you're running into that, you're probably running with a bad crowd anyway. It's mostly because imperative languages are popular, so network effects mean they'll just get better and better. If FP wants to chip away at that, it'll need to start off better and stay better. "Better" is many things, but it includes performance, cross-platformability (yes, Windows is necessary), documentation, and practicality (the ability to quickly accomplish random tasks without a huge prior time investment, Python seems to be the best at this so far).