Yeah you can. I find it a little more clunky. Many of the things I prefer are just syntactic sugar. But if I'm honest I really like syntactic sugar.

On top of that I find functional first languages are great for forcing you to learn functional styles that you can later user in languages like C#.

C# is a brilliant language and I wouldn't knock it. I'd use that as a first option at work but on a hobby project I'm going to play with F#.