Thinking back to my days of starting programming, it was a lot easier to get my head around "do this then that" rather than working in expressions and functional paradigms.

When teaching/instructing others, this impression only deepened.

It took a long while to even understand why functional programming has any appeal. I know that some university courses start out with scheme or lisp as a first language. But I suspect they get away with it because they have a captive audience and one that is already selected for high math tolerance.