> Honestly I think it might be time to phase out teaching imperative and object-oriented programming. Most of the grief in my career has come from them. I don't

> Honestly I think it might be time to phase out teaching imperative and object-oriented programming. Most of the grief in my career has come from them. I don't care if they're where the jobs are. The mental cost of tracing through highly-imperative code, especially the new implicit style of languages and frameworks like Ruby and AngularJS (which have logic flows having no obvious connection to one another, or transition through async handlers connected by a convention which isn't immediately obvious to the developer) is so high that the underlying business logic is effectively obfuscated. I don't think this is a fault of functional programming as much as it is a fault of implicit language constructs. There are common conventions where being able to chuck functions and closures around is actually useful (e.g. sorting). These language constructs/conventions are useful because they can be extremely expressive, but unfamiliar implicit behaviors cost me much more "working memory" to understand when I'm reading the code. There's a version of object-oriented programming that mostly sticks to declarative behaviors and uses inheritance, unions, mix-ins, etc. to actually hide behavioral abstractions. The problem is that it often takes 5-10 years of experience before the programmer (myself included) begins to appreciate how important future readability of the code is, and to understand that the more exotic language features should be used sparingly.