[TrackerFF]

I see they mentioned previous course knowledge - this is something you see in many (programming) classes.

Students that have zero prior knowledge in programming, are able to pick up functional programming pretty easy. Students that have studied and used paradigms like OOP, seem to have a hard time grokking functional programming - as they see everything through the lens of OOP (and the languages they've used).

[btilly]

Functional and OOP techniques do not seem to be best friends.

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom... uses Java to discuss what this can look like in an extreme case.