I don't have a strong opinion on whether OO should be in the 'introductory' curriculum, and see some value in this choice, since it gets kids early before they code everything as for() loops.
That may surprise those who read my thoughts in various media, where I deride the majority of CS courses at some length and with emphasis.
I am of course a C/
C++ bigot, but
C++ code is an expression of my thoughts. not the thoughts themselves, a
Real programmer thinks in a far richer framework than he codes. Some of my thoughts are functional, indeed anyone with a competent mathematical education must necessarily experience discomfort expressing some ideas in the iterative/recursive form that most programming languages require.
Functional programming this thus a necessary part of a programmer's education, even if he ends up debugging legacy VB code in an Indian sweatshop, indeed it is FP that will help him avoid that fate, since he can choose between more ways of solving problems.
Connor says that OO was the big thing when he was a student, actually I was there when OO was muscling in against FP, which is part of the primordial soup of programming culture, and some key CS ideas are very much harder to understand if you don't have FP in your vocabulary.
I'm also indifferent as to which FP language to choose, I see growth in F# and think that's a good thing, but am forearmed for any FP language religious war people around here may choose to have.
For the very specific subset of programming used in this line of work it's clear that FP has a lot to offer.
For a start, we have long lost the luxury of being able to write high end code as if it could be efficiently executed in a single thread on a single CPU, and FP offer a route to make that transition easier.
Also, let's be very clear about the majority of the code you people will be writing in your career, >95% will not be in any meaningful way performance critical, some of you will never ever write a program where anyone notices that it's fast or slow.
They
will notice that the bloody thing ain't working yet. They will notice this quietly as first, then more insistently and during your career assume there will be cases where a number of highly focused bankers notice that your code ain't working yet. They may even notice with extreme prejudice. If FP gets the job done, then screw with the critical parts to make them go faster later, or recode.
Let me share an iron rule in the micropolitics of software a development, a programmer who gets something out quickly, then makes version 2.0 run faster is a hero, one who takes
exactly the same time to produce one equally efficient program with no intermediate delivery is reporting to the first programmer and earns less.
