I remember two times where learning a language that didn't embed the full paradigm (ADA objects) made me understand it better (Class OOP as in Java), the other one was monads in emacs lisp, so I think I understand your point.
The design recipes felt a little bit dull at first, but for a newcomer it's probably the good rhythm anyway. And now I often 'construct' my function through stubs, tests and then full code. Kudos to the authors.
