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it's funny, in French engineering schools we have the opposite reaction; in "prep" schools students are taught OCaml which is their first programming language i
by bufo 16y ago
it's funny, in French engineering schools we have the opposite reaction; in "prep" schools students are taught OCaml which is their first programming language if they're not geeks.
Functions returning functions seem a natural thing as they are used to the exact same kind of abstraction in math (and even sometimes order 3+ functions when you study duality!). Conversely, they are initially puzzled when they are taught Java in their engineering school because of the difference between static variables and attributes, constructors and other unnatural concepts.
- eru 16y ago`Unnatural' in the sense of `not relating to natural transformations'?
- Dn_Ab 16y agoUnlikely since natural transformations are a statement on how a particular collection of functions behave under composition.
- Dn_Ab 16y agoyea, anyone who has ever done differentiation or messed with probabilities involving random variables has played with 'higher order functions'.
- lolipop1 16y agoIn some schools, you actually start with lambda calculus, just a bit more theoritical.
- groaner 16y agoMaybe it's a national pride thing as well, since OCaml was developed at INRIA.