Comment by vippy

It took me a while to grok monads, and the IO monad, and longer still to figure out how to compose them in safe ways, and manipulate execution order, etc. But: now I can write typesafe applications, and I produce fewer bugs when I work in non-FP languages (I get paid to write Java.) Lisp is a starting point. Haskell is where it's at. I recommend learning the style, even if you never produce production code in it.