You’re saying that you have imperative/procedural background. I can recommend reading this article on What’s Functional All About?.
My two cents: Not every problem should be solved in a functional way. Sometimes it is not convenient. But maybe we can locate the parts of the solution that need to store state, produce side-effects or do other non-functional stuff, isolate these parts and write functional code around them? If the answer is yes, then I’d say we can have much more readable, maintainable and testable code. And, often, more parallelizable.
To add to the resources @AstonJ mentioned, I’d like to suggest trying out Phoenix if you want to build a web thing, or Nerves if you want to build an embedded thing.
