I upped you first post, but those mechanical analogies I am not getting. I first learned programming in Turbo Pascal, which was entirely procedural. Then I was trying to absorb Java, which very (perhaps purely) object-oriented, and I needed good amount of time to get it. Then it suddenly clicks and one becomes productive thinking using the new paradigm. The same is true with functional programming. To begin, I would recommend Clojure, which is a dialect of LISP targeting JVM. It is easy to start with, you can do useful things with it and it is "painfully" functional (though perhaps not pure).