I think there are more fundamental differences between functional and imperative programming paradigms (or, perhaps, declarative and imperative programming styles?) than between passing by reference and passing by value (after all, variables are just references, filesystems have links, it just doesn't seem that unfamiliar).
I have definitely seen people struggle to wrap their head around declaring expressions representing what they want to compute when they are very used to imperative control flow like mutating some state while iterating through a loop.
> Kind of reminds me of a sect that promises you great things if only you work hard on leaving all your prior life behind.
I think this is sort of saying "hey this one thing looks like this other thing I don't like, therefore it must carry all the same problems". Perhaps we can call it "the duck type fallacy", but I don't think it's true to say that "anything which tries to change paradigm" is equivalent to cults.
That's the whole point of Rust, that they are not that. They are named, sized memory slots that values can be moved into or moved out of.
> I have definitely seen people struggle to wrap their head around ...
The struggle comes from being forced to use recursion where it doesn't make things easier to express but harder. Then they remember it all compiles down to machine code that just uses iteration fueled by bare metal equivalent of goto-s and the struggle feels pointless.
Imagine somebody took away your stack so when you want to do recursion, you'd be forced to roll your own stack every time. You'd struggle too.
> definitely seen people struggle to wrap their head around...
I think it's a top-down vs bottoms-up approach to solving a problem.
Most people actually think in terms of top-down. They break a problem down into smaller sub-problems, which they then either break down more or has done sufficient breaking down to solve it.
I think functional style of thinking would make you do a bottoms-up approach to problem solving. You will create a very small solution (function) to solve a very trivial version/type of the problem, then repeat for each small thing. Once you have sufficient number of basic functions written, you can assemble them into solving a bigger problem.
I have definitely seen people struggle to wrap their head around declaring expressions representing what they want to compute when they are very used to imperative control flow like mutating some state while iterating through a loop.
> Kind of reminds me of a sect that promises you great things if only you work hard on leaving all your prior life behind.
I think this is sort of saying "hey this one thing looks like this other thing I don't like, therefore it must carry all the same problems". Perhaps we can call it "the duck type fallacy", but I don't think it's true to say that "anything which tries to change paradigm" is equivalent to cults.