[specialp]

This is true to some extent (IMO Elm and Haskell) but I think at least being exposed to one functional language will make anyone a better developer in all languages.

I started programming in Clojure, Clojurescript, and now messing around with OCaml. The primary language I use at work is Ruby.

The aspect of FP that really helped me even be a better Ruby developer was just having way less shared state. When you have less shared state, and small functions doing one thing with as little side effects as possible it really makes code cleaner and it makes your software behave in much more predictable ways.

I know what some are saying "Well that seems like what you should be doing anyway..." That is true but at least working with a FP language really drives this home and for me did more for code quality improvement than anything else. In fact now when I look at most Ruby code even in big high quality projects I am like why??? Ruby gives you so many ways to do things without shared state (blocks) yet so many choose to set instance variables all over, or store stuff in variables in memory.

I still am not sold on strong static typing such as in Haskell, and yes I get the opinion of what you said about that community. I am not sure though if it is because I am bad at it, or it truly takes more work than it saves you in the future. I just find with FP as in Clojure and OCaml it gives me a lot of gain without ever getting in my way. So it is worth trying, and even if you keep working in a large imperative language, FP experience will help you not fall into the holes of large shared state.