Should functional programming be taught before imperative programming? [closed]

Answer 1

First, I find the basis of your question faulty because I was taught functional programming at school. (It wasn't what I started with, but we did do some functional programming.)

Second, I question the ease of transferring from functional coding to imperative coding. I don't think it'd be as easy as you make it out to be.

Third, programming is (for most people) a job skill. The vast majority of shops use imperative programming. Therefore, it's most useful to future coders to learn imperative programming.

Answer 2

Honestly, I think this is the wrong question to ask.

If the goal of an introductory class is to teach basic computer science, algorithms, programmatically solving problems, then your course is fundamental and you can choose one based on clarity, simplicity, and getting your ideas across. Some functional languages will be great for this. Particularly if the students have little or no previous experience.

Usually this isn't really the goal of many introductory classes, though. They may require certain techniques or certain languages for a later course. They may want to leverage particular libraries, etc. They may just have to match someone elses checkbox list of "features".

So I think you want to turn your question on its head. Figure out what it is the course is actually trying to achieve, and pick the best language you can for that purpose. In some cases, this may be a functional language.

If what you are really asking is how best to teach introductory level programming and computer science, that's a different can of worms.

Answer 3

The clear control flow of imperative programming lends itself well to implementation and analysis of algorithms in a teaching environment. Object-oriented programming is a convenient extension of that, so it is naturally what gets used most often. Functional programming (declarative programming of any kind really), on the other hand, is a completely separate paradigm that requires a whole new set of considerations (performance and otherwise) many of which are much easier to visualize if you understand imperative programming first. After all, it all boils down to an imperative language in the end.