About Teaching Functional Programming

How to teach functional programming? What are the proper steps, beyond the first ones? Especially when you can't or don't want to point to a framework and say "we do it this way!"

Lars outlines his ideas for teaching Elixir to someone without requiring any prior programming experience.

There is also discussion of mapping, reducing, and representing one in terms of the other. Also things which are better in Haskell than Elixir, perfectly named modules, and - inevitably - why you don't just use Rust instead.

Links

ChalmersCakeMLElixir in action - Saša's Elixir bookMonadMapReduceFilterMapReduceElixir's enum moduleMultiple function heads in an anonymous functionImmutabilityGuards in Elixir and HaskellWitchcraft - the moduleNervesFrank HunlethREPL

Quotes

It felt like I cheated, I don't know if I didIn my bone marrow!Putting the module before the functionsTry to explain a monad (there is no second step)Pretend that the rest of computing doesn't existIgnore the rest of the worldSave brain cyclesSolid, sound, and trueIt's going to have to be a reduceI never really updated my map