Functional programming more important than OO at Carnegie Mellon University

[Midas]

From Slashdot:
CMU Eliminates Object Oriented Programming For Freshman
http://tinyurl.com/4k2tbfb

Actual article:
Teaching FP to freshmen
http://tinyurl.com/4ulxbzo

Excerpt:
"This semester Dan Licata and I are co-teaching a new course on
functional programming for first-year prospective CS majors. This
course is part of the new introductory CS curriculum at CMU, which
includes a new course on imperative programming created by Frank
Pfenning, and a planned new course on data structures and algorithms,
which will be introduced by Guy Blelloch this fall.
...
Object-oriented programming is eliminated entirely from the
introductory curriculum, because it is both anti-modular and anti-
parallel by its very nature, and hence unsuitable for a modern CS
curriculum. A proposed new course on object-oriented design
methodology will be offered at the sophomore level for those students
who wish to study this topic."

[Ahmed Al-Saadi]

Thanks for sharing!

It's interesting for sure that they should take such a step, though it's
not entirely strange to academia. My main programming language course at
university was Scheme. Both OOP and FP are taught in ways that do not
sufficiently address the industry as they do not address design issues
nor provide sufficient real-life development experience. However, I have
a personal bias towards FP principles and welcome such changes!

-signed(ahmed).

[Alex Daskalov]

FP or not, what I see really lacking in most schools is a focus on
good design principles.
I'm also biased toward FP, and those languages I think are best for
teaching the nature of computation.

I was shocked the first time I watched the SICP lectures online. I've
been telling people that those lectures are more valuable than a CS
degree from McGill, and I don't think I'm exaggerating.

I'm going to try teaching an intro programming course this summer by
bringing students with a decent mathematical background from the
functions they're used to in math, through lambda calculus, on to
haskell, and then through a slew of FP languages, most likely SML,
ocaml, lisp, scheme, clojure, and of course, erlang.

You're all welcome to attend the lectures and help out if you find the time.

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[François Pinard]

Le 2011-05-18 10:48, Alex Daskalov a �crit :

> FP or not, what I see really lacking in most schools is a focus on
> good design principles. I'm also biased toward FP, and those

> languages [...]

Hi, Alex, and people.

Stumbling on that old message of yours by accident, I had a chuckle!
You have to understand that my initials are FP :-). Thanks for all the
appreciation! :-)

> Ahmed Al-Saadi <thater...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Thanks for sharing!

By the way, MSLUG is attempting a rebirth, as some of you might know
already, and intends to have a wider view, covering not only Scheme, but
other languages having similarities, like JavaScript or Erlang.

If our group has difficulty to take over on a long flight all by itself,
maybe we could join forces and merge? Just an idea. Surely, MSLUG was
once rather successful, and could be again I guess.

Keep happy, all.

Fran�ois (OK, OK -- FP!)

[Ahmed Al-Saadi]

On 10/22/11 8:54 AM, Fran�ois Pinard wrote:
<snip>

> By the way, MSLUG is attempting a rebirth, as some of you might know
> already, and intends to have a wider view, covering not only Scheme, but
> other languages having similarities, like JavaScript or Erlang.
>
> If our group has difficulty to take over on a long flight all by itself,
> maybe we could join forces and merge? Just an idea. Surely, MSLUG was
> once rather successful, and could be again I guess.
>
> Keep happy, all.
>
> Fran�ois (OK, OK -- FP!)
>

Fran�ois, it's like you read my mind. I was gonna suggest that we have a
sort of a common event, but wasn't sure if MSLUG is geared more towards
academic topics. I'll shoot an email on their list in response to Marc's
email and see what people think. I regret not having enough time to push
for more erlang-montreal events.

Cheers,
-signed(ahmed).