[ealhad]

That's an interesting assumption.

It might be true to a degree, yet I reckon the problem lies in CS teaching. A vast majority of programmers seem to start with imperative languages, hence they are more familiar with the procedural paradigm, and when they encounter functional code it seems alien and difficult to work with.

That's why I wrote people “just have to properly learn” functional languages. But your hypothesis is probably true as well.