Yep, that's the one! Thanks again. Despite often not totally agreeing with Joel, I taught myself and my classmates C and then C++ in high school, re-learned C

Yep, that's the one! Thanks again. Despite often not totally agreeing with Joel, I taught myself and my classmates C and then C++ in high school, re-learned C++ in college, and am one of those people who railed against Java as a replacement. My knee-jerk reaction would be that functional programming isn't an important skill for industry... but then neither are the low-level RDBMS classes I took as requirements, and I'm sure a lot of other people could chime in with "US university failed to prepare me for work" stories of their own, so that's beaten to death. I'm getting over my reactive Java loathing thanks to Android, but man, it'd still be nice to get people learning functional and procedural and object-oriented programming.