I follow your blog.  I&#x27;m a month from 40 and agree.  After several years working mostly in Clojure, Scala, and F#, I am finding myself most productive in traditional languages even though they&#x27;re less interesting.  And am finding <i>projects</i> more interesting than <i>implementations</i>, which is probably the way it should be.<p>I&#x27;m finding now that OOP is actually a pretty good model for most things.  Loops and mutation reflect reality: you do a task N times and write down each result; you don&#x27;t take the first N results from an infinite seq of tasks.  IoC is useful.  In addition having a much larger set of things to copy&#x2F;paste from github&#x2F;stackoverflow is nice.<p>That said, most (all?) of my paid work is pretty banal, nothing that&#x27;s really begging for functional style.  And for whatever reason I&#x27;ve never had much success with REPLs.  Getting them updated correctly with the code and dependency changes, typing in what I want to test, then running it always seems to take me longer than just executing the app and testing changes directly.