Yeah this 100%. FP isn't hard because of FP - it's all the other things that popular FP languages come with that makes them hard to understand. Arguably most of them are not related to FP; they're just style choices:
1. Global type inference.
2. Implicit syntax (no brackets for function calls, commas to separate arguments, semicolons to end statements/expressions, etc.)
3. Currying & point free style.
4. Tendency to have very deep nested expressions. The gap between `let foo =` and it's actual value can often be hundreds of lines.
I'm sure you can write FP code that avoids these issues and is easy to follow but it doesn't seem like people do that in practice.
Rust avoided all of these issues fortunately.
(Oh I forgot about monads.)
1. Global type inference.
2. Implicit syntax (no brackets for function calls, commas to separate arguments, semicolons to end statements/expressions, etc.)
3. Currying & point free style.
4. Tendency to have very deep nested expressions. The gap between `let foo =` and it's actual value can often be hundreds of lines.
I'm sure you can write FP code that avoids these issues and is easy to follow but it doesn't seem like people do that in practice.
Rust avoided all of these issues fortunately.
(Oh I forgot about monads.)