alt Hacker News> I love everything about Elixir, but Elixir constantly makes me doubt myself like no other language. My brain isnt made for functional stuff, but this makes me want to try again.
I experienced this really painfully when I was in college and took a kind of "survey of programming paradigms" course and tried Haskell for the first time. I'd been programming for years by then, and I couldn't believe how helpless I was at trying to complete things that had long felt "basic" to me.
But I don't think it's about the brain not being suited, I think it's that contrast of your experience level in imperative languages vs. the fact that when working in a pure functional style, you start out as a newbie again.
I think you'll gradually improve. I think the thing that finally made functional programming feel comfy for me was realizing how much I love composing code that basically feels like more generously spaced Bash "one-liners". The data starts out in one shape, so you run a command to dump it. Then you think of a step that gets it closer to what you want, you pipe it to that next command, and you take another look. And you keep going and at the end what you're looking at is typically pretty close to a series of transformations of data that you never mutate!
Part of what makes this feel comfy in the shell is that you build up that vocabulary of commands just by puttering around your file system every day. Over the years my library of familiar "functions" in a Unix-like environment has grown quite large. In a pure functional programming environment, you have to do the same thing but it takes a little more effort to learn the vocabulary. Your most frequently used "commands" will be functions like map, fold, and zip instead of grep, cat, or sort. But the core of it is really the same, and what I love about building pipelines applies equally to both: you can build it piece by piece, and for each puzzle you're on, you can forget about the previous steps and just think about the next transformation of the data that's in front of you. There is something refreshingly, relaxingly low-context about that.
Anyway I hope you give it a try and enjoy it. When we can learn to enjoy being bad at something, that's how we finally get good at it.
> But I don't think it's about the brain not being suited, I think it's that contrast of your experience level in imperative languages vs. the fact that when working in a pure functional style, you start out as a newbie again.
When I was in university, the introductory class was about Java, and an advanced class in the next semester was about Haskell. There were many imperative/functional newbies in both classes, but the Haskell class still progressed much more slowly. Haskell is simply much harder to grasp, independently of experience.
You can also see this in the fact that even mathematicians use Python rather than Haskell for simulations. Despite the fact that there is no population that is better suited for Haskell than mathematicians.
Even cookbooks are always written in an imperative style, never in a functional one. Why is that? Human brains find imperative algorithms simply more intuitive, and this is not explained by not being used to functional ones.