When teaching our students concurrent programming using Erlang we never actually mentioned recursion and state immutability. With some careful hand-holding in t

When teaching our students concurrent programming using Erlang we never actually mentioned recursion and state immutability. With some careful hand-holding in the first exercises, most of the students seemed to be able to do fine. During three years of teaching the class, only two students ever asked me about immutability ("why can't I change the value of this variable?"). Recursion went similarly unnoticed, it was just the way one programmed in Erlang. Still, a lot of the code produced in the assignments was not very good, but that is to be expected from the course level and the students. There are two main reasons why I think that most students picked it up without too big troubles. First is that we are just using these things as part of a language while focusing on other topics (concurrent programing). The other is that Erlang is language with such a different syntax from the normal Java-fare that one naturally expects to not be able to do things in the same way.