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The Risks and Benefits of Teaching Purely Functional Programming in First Year

From the abstract:

We argue that teaching purely functional programming as such in freshman courses is detrimental to both the curriculum as well as to promoting the paradigm. Instead, we need to focus on the more general aims of teaching elementary techniques of programming and essential concepts of computing. We support this viewpoint with experience gained during several semesters of teaching large first-year classes (up to 600 students) in Haskell. These classes consisted of computer science students as well as students from other disciplines. We have systematically gathered student feedback by conducting surveys after each semester. This article contributes an approach to the use of modern functional languages in first year courses and, based on this, advocates the use of functional languages in this setting.

paper...

By fogus at 2009-10-21 15:20 | LtU Forum | login or register to post comments | other blogs | 5991 reads

Implicit functional parallelism papers

I have been having some difficulties finding papers describing some of the results in this area and the strength/shortcomings of the general approach and could use some help. Are there some good recent reviews of these ideas and which papers are considered the seminal works in the field?

Thanks in advance,

By Carter Cheng at 2009-10-21 19:13 | LtU Forum | login or register to post comments | other blogs | 3819 reads