I'm a long-time C++ programmer, and I set out to learn Haskell at one point. I didn't really 'finish', but everything I learned tended to make me think, "Ok, so it's like having a library full of algorithms that let you do useful work on data in a standard way." In other words, each "paradigm shattering" language feature, I saw as a big C function that you just don't see, because it's part of the language. But underneath, I know there's still the equivalent of a cool library, just in the runtime.