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A comment on Ask HN: Is teaching my 8yr old son a functional language first a bad idea?.

Re:Ask HN: Is teaching my 8yr old son a functional language ... by alistproducer2 on Thursday April 27, 2017 @01:03PM (#14213038)
My oldest is a girl who spends several hours a day drawing comics so I'm not sure she would enjoy programming, bu tI do have some thoughts on the subject as a person that has taught children programming.

I find that functional languages force the user to think in a more artistic, creative way than imperative languages. It's out of the box thinking by design. The danger is that if the student is interested enough to push past the initial discomfort of being lost, you risk poisoning the well for some time (maybe forever).

Learning programming is stumbling through the woods no matter the language design, but functional languages can be more brutal.

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Re:Ask HN: Is teaching my 8yr old son a functional language ... by davelnewton on Thursday April 27, 2017 @02:13PM (#14213600)
If the person in question hasn't been exposed to anything else there's no unlearning. It's easier to teach a non-programmer FP than a programmer that's been exposed to imperative programming only (at least in my experience).

Not including Haskell here.

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Re:Ask HN: Is teaching my 8yr old son a functional language ... by tonyedgecombe on Thursday April 27, 2017 @02:35PM (#14213726)
Functional programming certainly changes the way you think about many problems but I'm doubtful learning an imperative language first is detrimental.
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Re:Ask HN: Is teaching my 8yr old son a functional language ... by pythonaut_16 on Thursday May 04, 2017 @12:38PM (#14266286)
Imperative programming is just functional programming where some (many) of the inputs and outputs are hidden :)
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Re:Ask HN: Is teaching my 8yr old son a functional language ... by davelnewton on Thursday April 27, 2017 @04:31PM (#14214444)
It depends; I should amend it to say that if all that is focused on is imperative programming it can be a greater leap to FP than if the initial learning is either a comparative class or FP-first.
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