Some advice on teaching FP

Bob is an incredibly smart and accomplished guy, and I imagine the students will get a lot from the course.<p>That being said the tone of triumphalism and the suggestion that a whole bunch of tough problems in CS (parallelism, program verification of real systems) are about to be solved by the majesty of strongly-typed functional languages is awfully familiar from the way Bob was talking about 15-20 years ago.<p>We certainly have seen many interesting research papers, type systems and compilers since then, but I'm not sure whether much progress has been made on anything more visible to the much-maligned 'working programmer'.

I'm a TA (one of four) for the course Harper is talking about in this post. As they say on reddit, ask me anything. I do not guarantee I'll answer. I'll check back in in the morning.

"One beautiful feature of the language-based approach is that we start with a very familiar model of computation, the evaluation of polynomials over the reals. It’s very familiar for all students, and I think they find it very satisfying precisely because it has a direct computational flavor."<p>Don't know how true this is at other universities, but this doesn't sound like my experience at all. :)