Newsflash: Learning can be hard. Programming is a hard subject. Learning a hard subject is extra hard. Some people will have trouble with it, sure, but they should maybe pick an easier subject.

And really, I do not think you know what you're talking about when you dismiss functional programming. Maybe you haven't worked on projects big enough to understand the need for abstraction? ... Sure, Haskell and Scheme are not the world's most practical programming languages, but techniques from functional programming are invaluable, and they can help you write clear, effective code even in C.