Well, following the advice I got here I started out with Erlang - where you have much of the same issues you describe, too. However, having immutable variables also allows for some pretty nifty stuff in Erlang (and I guess in Haskell even more; thinking of assignment as regex matching etc.), and I would even say for Erlang, which has no static type safety, it actually might come as a blessing. I don't know how often I have traced errors in dynamic languages exactly because of that (or - even worse - still have bogus code I never noticed...). And I don't know why, but to me functional programming in C, Python and Lisp always had seemed far easier than grasping a decent OO model in Java or anything - at best I liked AOP, but that seems pretty quiet nowadays; and with "green threads" and all that stuff coming along, it seems that my easier approach to "functional" is a benefit finally...