what to study next?

dear programmers:

would it be harmful or dumb to learn functional programming before any other paradigm, such as imperative, or object-oriented? i took one course in college intro c++ and want to move forward now, so i'm thinking either object-oriented and moving to data structures (berkeley cs dept available free on their site), or functional programming w scala (coursera) next.

thoughts?

>>9

Scheme is a language in the Lisp family. It diverged from (not evolved from!) Maclisp. So it shares something with today's Lisp (ANSI Common Lisp and , I suppose, ISO ISLisp) but it is not Lisp.

Technically, Scheme has shed some of its Lisp heritage in favor of ALGOL influence. For example, Scheme's symbols are not really symbols like Lisp symbols are. Furthermore, earlier versions of Scheme were defined as a grammar over text (very very unlispy!), as opposed to Lisp (Scheme) objects. For a long time, Scheme did not have eval either but you had read and load or something like this.

I like Scheme. It is "a" Lisp, but it is not Lisp. IN comparison, Common Lisp is both "a" Lisp and is Lisp (today).

SICP does teach you a programming language, especially the first few chapters. However, I assume you meant to say "SICP does not just teach you a programming language", in which case, I agree.