Carnegie Mellon stops teaching OO in favor of FP

Our goal at Carnegie is provide students with an education, not training. There are plenty of opportunities for them to learn the old ways, and to pick up industry practices on the fly. My department head recently had a meeting with the (very many) Carnegie alums working as developers at Facebook, and they overwhelmingly said that one of the three most important courses for them was my course on functional programming. The reason? Because they learned there how to think abstractly, and learned what the code “should be”, and then used this as a model for working with the code “as it is”. They cited their ability as giving them an overwhelming advantage over the other developers with whom they work. So, no, I have no regrets, and I firmly believe we are doing the right thing by our students.

Functional Programming, OOP