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?

OP Here, thank you Lisp guy - much appreciated. I will start on this path and report back. Just for clarification on the texts:

"Introduction to Algorithms", 2009 3rd edition, Cormen et al., ISBN 0262033844

"Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools", 2006 2nd edition, Aho et al., ISBN 0321486811

"The Java Language specification", 2005 3rd edition, Gosling et al., ISBN 0321246780

 Cheers