Introducing Scheme in a FP-less environment

Abstract

Since the rst programming language taught to students of the faculty of Applied Sciences is Scheme We brie y describe our preference for Scheme and give an overview of the course The controversial language choice induced a lot of reactions mainly because of unfamiliarity with the functional programming FP paradigm We are very open to these reactions and even more performed two surveys This article discusses the answers We believe to be the rst to actually concentrate on the students opinion This may be of particular interest to any teacher considering the move to Scheme or any other functional language but also to the general FP community In the beginning students especially those with advance knowledge of other programming languages are quite sceptic and even negative but the appreciation improves as the course moves on