Wadler's Blog

As a result of a recent Harvard workshop, there is a proposal to add FP to the ACM curriculum, and ACM members are encouraged to comment. Many excellent arguments appear on the comment page, here are two of my favorites.

Greg Morrisett:

I strongly endorse the recommendation to include functional programming in the curriculum. The most important benefit is a change in the mode of thought that can strongly influence design at all levels, from hardware to distributed systems. If they are to be successful, students must be able to pick up and learn new languages. Without deep experience in at least two very different environments, they will be unable to do so.

Robert Harper:

I endorse the proposed change to PL7/FunctionalProgramming to include more hours on the topic of functional programming and to correspondingly reduce commitment to vague or obsolete topics in the proposed curriculum. Functional programming has emerged as the central organizing principle in programming language design, and is increasingly important in industrial as well as academic settings. Once considered an esoteric niche topic, functional programming has emerged as a unifying conceptual framework that encompasses and enriches traditional concepts such as imperative and object-oriented programming. Many of the major innovations in language design over the last decade have emerged from the functional programming perspective, including reliance on managed storage ("garbage collection"); emphasis on static type disciplines in general and specific advances such as generics in particular; and the role of higher-order techniques, including functions and objects, for building reusable software component.

Current trends in the computer industry favor the functional perspective: (a) very large scale distributed computing models, such as Hadoop or map/reduce, depend essentially on the functional (state-free) model of computing; (b) small to medium-scale parallel computing, such as multicore processors or shared memory multiprocessors, strongly favors the functional model, which ensures determinacy of outcomes even in the presence of parallelism; (c) demand for mechanical verification of program properties to ensure software quality favors the functional model, which emphasizes the single most successful integration of formal methods into programming, rich static type systems.

It is entirely appropriate for ACM to place renewed emphasis on functional programming in the undergraduate curriculum. The present proposal, though overly modest, takes a step towards modernizing undergraduate education in programming languages. I urge that this change be adopted.