This one I still can't wrap my head around. F# basically was the source of almost all innovation in C# and C# still is missing some features and was not designed in the same way as F# so a lot of the features they "stole" feel tacked on.
Microsoft should have just made F# the C# successor.
You underestimate the importance of compatibility and familiarity for existing developers. You can show C# code to any C++, Java or even JS programmer and expect them to grasp the idea of what's going on very quickly. This is a big deal and should not be discarded lightly
I think the reason it sometimes seems like it is that easy is that, as we gain experience with tools, we tend to forget the difficulties we had learning them.
Learning F# it instantly clicked.
OOP learning issues IMHO are intrinsic to the style, because it's just so seldom helpful in making programming easier.
Design patterns are just a symptom of this issue. That OOP is just a misunderstanding another.
"Real" OOP as practiced in Erlang/Elixir is quite useful.
I was traditionally trained like you under OOP and procedural methodologies.
After encounter FP I fully bought in and developed two mental models. The fp model lives side by side with the the oop/imperative model.
With equal knowledge in both one can make a more unbiased judgement. The fp model is actually superior imo.
I largely have the opposite strategy now when programming. My mental model is largely fp, and I occasionally cheat and sprinkle in procedural or oop syntax here and there as syntactic sugar.
The basic realization here should be that mutating shared state should be avoided and segregated as much as possible.
To be fair, all languages are syntactic sugar over asm which is s-s over CPU machine code. A mental model is just that: a model for something physical that's in your head. FP or OOP are both mental models for programming in nearly any language. Some languages have first-class FP or OOP features, and some don't, but you can tack-on either of these, and others, to nearly any language you want to. It's really dumb to look down on others choice of mental model if it works for them. I have seen successful projects that were designed around both OOP and FP models.
their target audience does not want this