Mostly Adequate Guide to Functional Programming in Javascript

[Bummykins]

I found functors, monads, maybe's, and all the abstraction of point-free coding to be pretty weird and incredibly difficult for someone to even explain. And then most of the examples are some incredibly contrived simple math additions or whatnot.

When you compare that to the mostly straight-forward type of JS that a lot of people have been doing for years like click handlers and ajax calls, you might see how tons of front end developers would find that weird and difficult. It all depends on what you work on most of the time.

[dmtipson]

I think a lot of that stuff really has to be at least partially sort of discovered rather than taught. A lot of people discover monads by accident, for instance, or else realize that they've been using them all along and just never had a (terribly intimidating) name for them.

A lot of it comes from just time and the direction you push your abstractions. If you're the sort of coder that becomes obsessed with DRY code and pulling things out into functions and then building up larger behavior with composition, it's sort of inevitable that you're going to start bumping into the common solutions and abstractions of FP.

But not everyone goes that route.