Are you asking for tips on how to change your way of thinking? I am not familiar with Elm but remember that in mathematics there are no "assign" or "return" statements ;) You just evaluate an expression.

recursion is your friend :)

i personally liked elixir track on exercism.io

but i started with python did not like the OOP approach (and had difficulties understanding it - compared to just "in -> fn -> out")

then i learned elixir and later on clojure, so i never got deep into OOP to begin with and probably not the best person for guidance