buffyoda

The Reddits for the different functional programming languages are a good place to hangout (and a frequent source of blogs and videos on these topics), and for FP in non-FP languages, there are good Github communities (e.g. http://github.com/fantasyland/, no association with FIOL).

I'd also humbly suggest that LambdaConf 2017 (May 25-27) is a great place to learn more about functional programming. There will be a special two-day LambdaConf workshop prior to the conference that introduces the basics of functional programming (no background knowledge), another that is aimed at a slightly more experience audience, and then at the subsequent conference, plenty of workshops and sessions to learn many of these topics (and others).

It's a journey, but everyone can get there if they have the interest. Most of the resources out there (blogs, videos, even e-books) are free, and the remainder are low-cost if you are already working in tech.

Good luck and please just let any of us lurker functional programmers know if you need a hand. :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H28QqxO7Ihc

The point is that free monads allow introspection up to the information-theoretic limit (obviously you can't inspect a program whose structure depend on a runtime value), while transformers do not allow any introspection at all.