[Y_Y]

Thie irony is palpable. I had the (misfortune) of only being (mis)taught procedural languages by professors who thought computers were big calculators who could never be understood, but could be bent to your will by writing more code and maybe by getting a weird grad student to help.

Patterns might appear to the enlighted on the zeroth or first instance, but even the mortal must notice them after several goes. The magic of lisp is that if you notice yourself doing anything more than once you can go ahead and abstract it out.

Not everything needs to be lifted to functional valhalla of course, but not factoring out e.g. map and filter requires (imho) a wilful ignorance of the sort that no teacher should countenance. I think it's bad professional practise, bad pedagogy, and a bad time overall. I will die on this hill.

[eru]

If you are only used to Java (the bad, old, ancient version), you don't even notice that you can factor out map and filter.