I have a degree in History & Philosophy. I understand FP "well enough" to know what I like and don't like about it.

My third language was EdScheme, a very stripped down (13? 17? built in functions) version of Scheme, a dialect of LISP. That's about as classical FP as it gets. I was 12. I was in high school. I used it for half a school year, and our class was based on building a full-featured language on the very limited set of building blocks. For context, my first language was BASIC written with line numbers in vi on some ancient mainframe. My second was COBOL, in the same environment. After the half-year of EdScheme, we moved onto Pascal.

Your entire thinking here is not only obviously wrong - there are plenty of folks out there who understand FP just fine without a bunch of math courses - your attitude is elitist, and quite frankly, ignorant.

J.Ja