[ebolyen]

It's been a long time since I took a class like this, but I definitely had a similar experience to the author.

Ideas like fold and map where _never_ mentioned in lisp (to exaggerate, every function had to have the recursive implementation with 5 state variables and then a simpler form for the initial call), at no point did higher-order functions or closures make an appearance while rotating a list by 1 and then 2 positions.

The treatment of Prolog was somehow worse. Often the code only made any sense once you reversed what the lecturer was saying, realizing the arrow meant "X given Y" not "X implies Y", at which point, if you could imagine the variables ran "backwards" (unification was not explained) the outcome might start to seem _possible_. I expect the lecturer was as baffled by their presentation as we were.

In general, it left the rest of the class believing quite strongly that languages other than Java were impossible to use and generally a bad move. I may have been relatively bitter in the course evaluation by the end.

[Y_Y]

Thie irony is palpable. I had the (misfortune) of only being (mis)taught procedural languages by professors who thought computers were big calculators who could never be understood, but could be bent to your will by writing more code and maybe by getting a weird grad student to help.

Patterns might appear to the enlighted on the zeroth or first instance, but even the mortal must notice them after several goes. The magic of lisp is that if you notice yourself doing anything more than once you can go ahead and abstract it out.

Not everything needs to be lifted to functional valhalla of course, but not factoring out e.g. map and filter requires (imho) a wilful ignorance of the sort that no teacher should countenance. I think it's bad professional practise, bad pedagogy, and a bad time overall. I will die on this hill.

[eru]

If you are only used to Java (the bad, old, ancient version), you don't even notice that you can factor out map and filter.

[turtletontine]

Having been on the other side of this (teaching undergrads), I do get why courses would be structured like this. If you actually try explaining multiple things, lots of students freeze up and absorb nothing. Certainly there’s a few motivated and curious students who are three lectures ahead of you, but if you design the class for them, 60% of students will just fail.

So I get why a professor wouldn’t jump in with maps and folds. First, you need to make students solve a simple problem, then another. At the third problem, they might start to notice a pattern - that’s when you say gee your right there must be a better way to do this, and introduce maps and folds. The top 10% of the class will have been rolling their eyes the whole time, thinking well duh this is so boring. But most students seem to need their hand held through this whole process. And today, of course, most students are probably just having LLMs do their homework and REALLY learn nothing

[kstrauser]

Ah, yes. Like in the class where we learned Moscow ML, where loops don’t and variables ain’t, and Godspeed!