This is a real classic. As someone who had only done imperative programming before reading this it really inspired me to give FP a try and led me down the road to trying Scala and then Haskell. However a year into this adventure, I still prefer "nouns". I think the human brain really does work imperatively for most logical problems. I can't deny that for a single problem the functional solution is often more " beautiful" , but the end user can't see the beauty of my voice and I can always think of an efficient imperative solution much faster. I hope one day I'll have a functional epiphany and be able to write Haskell as fast as I can write Java but so far I haven't had such luck.
I think you've mistaken Yegge's point if you see it as "Declarative functional languages are better than imperative ones." It's more about how the version of OO embodied in Java warps your program designs in an awkward way. He presents functional languages as the antithesis of this because, well, they are. But it's certainly possible for an imperative language to put functions and data on the same level — Yegge's favorite language, JavaScript, is an imperative language that does this.
I understand it was more anti-Java than pro anything else, I just saw functional as his solution to this problem. I'm already fluent enough with Java that I see absolutely no need to switch to a different imperative language as my main workhorse, so I looked at Haskell as a sort of "go big or go home" approach to weaning myself off of mutable state, etc.
I would strongly suggest you give Erlang a try. It is a fairly pure functional language, but very very simple. You don't have to user the concurrency distributed parts.
I think this is actually an important thing that is missed when functional languages are touted as the next-big-thing we are always talking about Scala and Haskell. When we go learn either of these languages you climb a steep ladder into a world of very sophisticated type systems and this becomes the focus of our discussion of functional programming.
Alas, I fear we lose the most powerful lessons that functional programming has to give us.
1: Code operating on immutable data-structures is often really easy to reason about effectively
2: Recursion is a really great way to think about programming
3: Functions are wonderful when you can pass them around like data
The type systems in Haskell and Scala, not to mention the venerable Ocaml, are amazing and powerful. But I think they are often a distraction from the core benefits that a functional code base provides.
