Self-taught programmers are far too diverse to make any value judgment like this. Hackers, and I'll assume all those vaguely tracing their lineage from MIT, ha

Self-taught programmers are far too diverse to make any value judgment like this. Hackers, and I'll assume all those vaguely tracing their lineage from MIT, have never been associated with FP. There has always been a fascination with Lisp, but that's the extent of it. In practice, most of their software legacy has been in firmly imperative and procedural languages, but with touches of a Lisp here and there. It's precisely CS and academia where functional programming has been thriving. John Backus' research on function-level programming, Robin Milner on ML, David Turner on Miranda from which Haskell is almost a direct successor, etc. So on the whole, I have the exact opposite impression that you do.