[csneeky]

Fact: functional programming takes more time to learn. It's not full of people that are "smarter' or "snobs" it's just full of people that have taken the time and invested in educating themselves to get to the point where they can do it well. It's not "better", it's just a useful tool for certain types of problems. I'd advise any young engineer to just learn how to do both "imperative" and "functional" programming well and avoid getting dogmatic about it. The vitriol here is in dogma here to be sure

[shados]

When I was in college, a few decades ago, we had a class on object oriented programming. Out of about 60 people in the class, you could count on the fingers of one hand how many people passed. It was so bad the professor had to offer a redo. (Why yes, of course I passed, duh).

It was a long time ago and in C++, which is a touch trickier than Java or C#, but "traditional" programming isn't particularly simpler. It's just what's taught in school and what all the examples you google show. It's a self fulfilling prophecy.

Procedural vs functional? Yeah, the former is more intuitive to a beginner. But as soon as you go a little further than that, it's basically all about what you've been exposed to.

[josephg]

To add more weight here, when I was teaching programming in collage I found it quite surprising which concepts students found difficult to understand.

They struggled to learn pointers, which makes sense to me. They also struggled to learn OO. And they struggled to learn recursion and state machines. All this stuff seems so simple once you've internalized it.

I think there's something real to the idea that humans have a hardwired instinct for stories. And that makes learning imperative programming easier. But you move beyond your intuitive instincts pretty fast. And when you do, it really matters how well your language or environment helps you to think.

The problem with C++ templates is simply that they aren't very good language for thinking in. They're a mashup of functional concepts in an imperative language with bad syntax. But functional programming doesn't have to be done badly. For a comparison, look at spreadsheets. They're arguably the most popular programming languages in the world. And they're purely functional.

[kubb]

In my university, I was a part of an experimental class that did the introduction to programming class in Ocaml (we had to prove that we can write C beforehand).

There weren't issues with it. If functional programming was introduced earlier, people would have less trouble learning it.

Meanwhile Stanford does an analogous class in Python. And all of those alumni go on to define the industry trends.

[shepherdjerred]

OOP was still considered a difficult class at my college before I graduated a couple of years ago.

[scns]

The classes at CMU in SML provide some alternative "facts". FP != Haskell. If you start with FP, OOP seems weird and vice versa. My guess it is just our wetwares' expectations being violated.

[raspasov]

“Fact: functional programming takes more time to learn”

Is there evidence/studies about this?

[fiddlerwoaroof]

I haven’t tracked this down, but I believe the authors of How to Design Programs did some research and basically found that whether FP or OOP is harder depends on which you learned first.

[dnautics]

> Fact: functional programming takes more time to learn.

Is this a fact? I was taught scheme at age 12 and in four weeks I had a working compiler. And I have heard that a team taught middle schoolers erlang and got them writing a chat network in 2 days.

[nwmcsween]

Define "functional programming", it's a style and you can write imperative Haskell just like you can write functional C, in fact a language that is expressive enough to use different programming paradigm at the same time will be superior to to a single programming paradigm