[andjones]

I think this a wonderful approach and I was taught at Indiana University.

Recursion helped me learn how to break problems apart. Working with lists and the list primitives all the time gave me a leg up in data structures. Anonymous functions taught me about abstraction. Macros taught me to write programs for clarity and let the machine do the rewrite work. Many of the analytical skills I learned from FP I carry over to programming in other languages and problems solving in general.

The biggest complaint heard was "I don't see how this applies in the real world". This is fair, the number of job listings out there that mention Lisp, Scheme, or Haskell are far outweighted by other languages (i.e. java, C, C#, PHP, etc).

I always responded that learning FP teaches you how to think about programming. One of those "give a man a fish / teach a man to fish". That response generally drew blank stares, but it's something I believe is true.