[kstenerud]

We don't have a negative attitude towards these concepts; we just don't have a damn clue what these concepts even are, or how they're useful. And thus far the FP crowd haven't been very effective in communicating this.

I'm still waiting for THE article that actually explains how this stuff works in an accessible way, without resorting to a bunch of haskell code (for which you need to already know FP - catch-22), an assumed proficiency in category theory, heavy maths, esoteric toy problems that don't touch the real world, or technically correct yet unapproachable jargon ("A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what's the problem?").

Could you imagine teaching BASIC with "A variable is a container for values, which are themselves elements of a set of constrained possibilities. You assign to variables by collapsing the set into one possibility." That's what most FP articles feel like.

To have success in communication, you need to speak to your audience where they are; not where you wish they'd be.

Feynman was able to do this for physics; hopefully someday someone will do it for FP, and then you'll find us MUCH more receptive to the message.