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?

NO! You must write 5 programs, the programs being 1000, 2000, 4000, 8000, and 16,000 lines minimum in that order. You must complete each program in a maximum of 3 months each. One of your programs must be a software rasterizer, the other must be a compiler, the other a memory mapped database, the other an http server, and the last a UNIX clone. Then you shall attain the rank of "novice" in C++. Then you may move on to another language.

Otherwise you will become yet another Hacker News hipster. Doomed to discuss programming languages, yet never actually use them.

Sincerely, the /prog/ Lisp guy :)