Ruby is kind of nice in that there's not an easy way to iterate over a list without functional code. You start mapping and reducing pretty regularly, and then discover the power of higher-order array functions, and how it lends itself nicely to functional programming.

React/Redux is nice in that it pretty much forces you to wrap your head around the way functional programming works.

React/Redux was definitely a step up from Spaghetti-jQuery for me, but I'd stop short of calling it an enjoyable experience. It wasn't until I started playing around with Elixir that I really fell in love with functional code.

In a lot of ways, Elixir is really similar to Ruby, which makes it pretty easy to dive in (for a Ruby-ist). But in subtle ways, its functional nature really shines. The |> is perhaps my favorite programming concept I've come across. It's so simple, but it forces you to think about -- and at the same time makes it natural to comprehend -- the way data flows through your application.

Don't get me wrong, Elixir is still very much a functional language. It's allure in that it looks like an imperative language and has a lot of similarity to Ruby is misleading.

The learning curve might not be as steep as say, Lisp, but it' still quite steep. And I think it'd take around the same time to be meaningfully proficient in either.

Glad I got my Elixir/BEAM rave out for the day.