Absolutely - this is one of the things I like so much about doing them with Elixir. Between the built in testing framework and the REPL it's so easy to work through the problems iteratively.
I wish Elixir's REPL / editor integration was half as awesome as SLIME / Emacs, but it's still leaps and bounds beyond what you get in most non-functional langs.
F#'s REPL is pretty great as well for these kinds of puzzles. Send Selection lets you highlight up to a certain part midway through a pipeline. This makes debugging without breakpoints very easy, on top of everything else offered by an interactive REPL session!
I wish Elixir's REPL / editor integration was half as awesome as SLIME / Emacs, but it's still leaps and bounds beyond what you get in most non-functional langs.