I would argue that command sequences that mutate global state are far more intuitive to humans (food recipes, furniture assembly manuals, the steps to take to fix a flat tire on your bike, etc.) than functions. So it’s not just what we learn first in a pedagogic sense. We’re already wired for imperative programming. “Thread the state of the world through the food recipe instructions” is a ridiculous concept to a normal person.
I agree in principle. However, if you work imperatively, you'll use _much_ more (global) state than if you worked with a pragmatic functional language like Clojure. Which in turn leads to normal people not understanding what's going on, since humans are built to keep, say, 10 things (atoms) in mind, not 100.
