[lostcolony]

I think you need to start with a limited language in a given paradigm before you use a language that tries to be all things.

Back when I first wanted to learn FP principles, I tried with Scala. It went nowhere. I had a problem, and I didn't know how address it in an FP manner. The language didn't help me by getting in my way when I went down a wrong path, so I never learned the 'right' one for FP.

As a trivial example - I want to iterate, I can use a loop; it doesn't prevent me from using a loop and instead directing me to recursion. In fact, with recursion I get all sorts of terrifying comments about making sure it can be tail call optimized, to use @tailrec to make sure of that, or else I might explode the stack, oh-God-what-is-this-why-would-I-ever-do-this-etc. Meanwhile there is that good ol' friend 'for' waiting for me to help me get things done...

Having used other languages, though, recursion holds no fears. I still am not a fan of Scala, but I'd be okay with being given all the options. Though not for any sort of team development unless everyone else had also been exposed separately to the paradigm we were standardizing on.