[vundercind]

I’ve wondered for some time how this breaks down along preferences for math vs (human) language, or for proofs/formula thinking vs algorithmic.

I find FP concepts easy enough to grasp (provided they’re not demonstrated in e.g. Haskell) and even adjacent stuff like typeclasses or monads or what have you aren't a stumbling block, and I'm plenty comfortable with stuff like recursion.

… but I'm firmly on the language-is-more-natural-for-me side of things, and find non-algorithmically-oriented math writing incredibly difficult to follow—I have to translate it to something more algorithmic and step-oriented to make any headway, in fact. I find languages like Haskell nearly illegible, and tend to hate reading code written by dedicated FP fans in just about any language.

[Dansvidania]

the "FP is for math people" meme IMO is incorrect and comes from FP mainly being used to refer to Pure FP, aka Haskell.

While Monads and co. are interesting constructs, I think the main thing with FP (pure or not) is immutability by default.

That alone makes code so much easier to think about, in my experience.

One can do FP in languages not commonly associated with FP by just not (re)assigning variables. FP languages just make it increasingly hard to do so.

[agumonkey]

To it wasn't really math, even though there was some of that, it was about the amount of concepts and devices that have to work together.

Ability to reason about expressions means everything can be run and have a result without side effects (unless you allow, say, lisp effectful builtins). The fact that everything is built around function means you can always unplug or compose them. All this with a very reduced set of ideas and syntax (at least for the core)

On the other hand most imperative languages required you to pay attention to state, which is rapidly a mental dead end, with a lot more ceremony and syntax. At least before the 2010s .. nowadays everybody has expression oriented traits and lambdas.

After learning ml/haskell and doing interesting things with a kind of clarity.. I tried going back to c/python and suddenly a lot of errors, issues and roadblocks started to appear.

Then you have the parallel case.

[jltsiren]

When I was younger, I found writing essays, mathematical proofs, and imperative code very similar activities. Functional programming was difficult, because I could not find the right way to think about it.

Over time, I have slowly become better at functional programming. But I'm now worse with proofs and essays due to the lack of practice.