[Discuss] Functional programming @ UVic (was 'C' string tokenizer for those who hate strtok)

[Adam Parkin]

Murray Strome wrote:
> From my ancient experience, when OO was in its infancy, it was found 
> that, in general, people who had first learned functional programming 
> (and that includes me) had a much more difficult time learning to become 
> really good Object Oriented programmers.  I have taught both types, and 

That's probably true, but then again so is the converse: people who 
learn OO first have a tough time picking up functional programming (or 
at least I did).  So the question then becomes: is it easier to go from 
an OO background to a functional one, or from a functional background to 
an OO one?  I think it's easier to start with functional, but since 
that's the opposite of the way I did it, I could just be jaded by how 
hard functional programming was for me in the beginning. =8->

> Thus, I am not sure that concentrating on OO in first year is 
> necessarily a bad thing.  However, I don't know about any studies which 
> compare the effectiveness of programmers using functional techniques 
> after first learning OO.

I'm not saying concentrating on OO in first year is bad, I just don't 
think it should be the *only* thing.  I'd rather have a blend of 
different languages/paradigms than just one way of approaching a problem 
taught.
-- 
Adam Parkin
E-mail: pzelnip at telus.net
--------------------------
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