Have you actually tried it? I dunno, after using Clojure for a while I realize now - there's nothing weirder than having to dig into deep, nested hierarchies of Java classes. I simply don't understand anymore people who willingly write that kind of code and even claim to be happy and productive.
I would venture a guess to say that what makes FP or declarative style programming/thinking feel weird is not any great context like the nature of the human brain but rather the lesser one that usually people try to learn it after already having had learned imperative style stuff.
The functionally written recipe from https://probablydance.com/2016/02/27/functional-programming-... may be less helpful if I need to know exactly what steps to take to bake a cake, but it will actually be much more helpful if I want to know what a baked cake is. It isn't quite a fair example because it leverages how humans already know what a baked cake is, what a preheated oven is, etc and the clunkiness of the FP-style recipe is likely more due to that than anything fundamental to FP.
Let's try a different example that better maps to real world application logic. The task is to build a scootybooty.
Imperatively, a scootybooty program is:
- Acquire four wheels and two axels.
- Chop down a tree.
- Plane wood from tree into curved flat shape.
- Attach axels to convex side of planed wood shape.
- Attach wheels to axel.
Declaratively it is:
- A scootybooty is a planed plank of wood with two trucks.
- A planed plank of wood is a flat board.
- A truck is an axel with two wheels.
Now imagine your boss asks you wtf this scootybooty thing is and what it can do. Which program more quickly allows you to answer these questions? My favorite thing about the FP/declarative paradigm is that the mental model first-classes the abstract thing you are implementing above how you implement it. Imperative style encourages you to think about the steps it takes to do something moreso than the thing itself which IMO can lead to cart-before-horse type mistakes in planning. Declarative programming: "the forest is made of many trees", imperative programming: "tree, tree, tree, tree, tree, tree..."
It's not just my team, there are many of people working with Clojure and other functional languages out there, and there are plenty of FP projects in productions in pretty much every domain.
Functional programming is weird in the same way Japanese is weird to an Anglophone. A person who learned Japanese as their mother tongue will find English equally weird. The comments in the link you posted already address the points the author tries to make, which all boil down to FP being different from what they're used to.
Here’s an example of people finding functional programming unnatural, maybe you can leverage your experience to explain why he is wrong:
Functional Programming Is Not Popular Because It Is Weird https://probablydance.com/2016/02/27/functional-programming-...