Nah, diagrammatic reasoning is part of it. Separate yourself from syntax.
Doodling on paper (or just mentally envisioning a data structure) is way more fun than writing actual code.
I certainly would dissuade the OP from trying Elm. Not as part of learning state machines at least. Too many things at once and not necessary.
Thanks for sharing that link! I've tried reading about them in the past and always walked away more confused, but this article seems more readable. I'll give it a thorough read this weekend. Thank you!
I remember the first time hearing about them and being totally confused by the wikipedia page. I think the first article that made sense to me was this one, because it used a webapp example: https://www.infoq.com/articles/robust-user-interfaces-with-s...
And then developing a few sample applications, especially with Elm or another language with custom types, really completed my understanding. The diagrams and math notation are more intimidating than the actual code.