I have to say, it makes a big difference who you learn from (or perhaps how you learn). In college I had several courses where we programmed in Scheme and I hated every minute of them because I felt like Scheme made things harder and uglier with no tangible benefit.

Then I had a class where we learned Haskell with one of the best professors in the department. He basically taught me all of the great things about functional programming and now I try to use concepts from that class in whatever language I'm programming in.

Learning functional programming is paradigm-shifting and gives you a much broader set of tools to work with, but if it's not taught well it won't help you.