What I see in your comments is the constant stream of I's.
I, me, I did, I studied, I think this, I think that.
Guess what? Nobody cares that much except for you.
When talking about basics, we should consider the least common denominator of all programmers' knowledge.
You can reason that the basics should be different, but what if you are wrong? You are a smart guy who loves scala, but there are other smart guys who consider scala a failure, for example. And there are guys smarter than you and me who just do it all in C because they can't be bothered with abstractions, and FP is an abstraction in the end.
People are different, and if you think that you're such an unique yet the most important snowflake - why?
Nobody questions your ability to write successful FP code. So what? What does it prove? Nobody even questions that.
But there are people who write FORTH. And there are people who write Prolog. Both groups claim they get much bigger bang for the buck than anyone else. Why do we listen to you and not them?
You keep expressing your opinion. Please tell me how there is no "I" in your opinion. I see two of them: o-p-I-n-I-o-n.
Also, I never said not to listen to any of these other folks. It was you who told me that I didn't learn to program in my first programming class because it started with functional programming as the most fundamental concept. That statement was offensive and false, and I am now demonstrating to you why you are so wrong.
This is not to say that there are not many possible reasonable approaches. I think the one I learned was great. Are there better approaches? Who knows? Certainly not you.
SICP is overrated to whom? For me, it was the most profound and wonderful educational experience of my life. I found it to be profoundly inspirational and educational. I found it to be beautiful, uplifting, moving, rewarding, and just incredible in all sorts of ways that I cannot even begin to express. And it pumped up my joy of learning in a way that survives to this day, decades later. There are not enough words in the English language for me to express how much this course meant to me and how much intellectual joy it provided me.
Of course, YMMV.
As to what I should and should not do, who are you to tell me that?
Mathematically, immutability is more fundamental than mutability, as the mathematical models for computer programs all model mutability in terms of immutability.
Pedagogically, either approach seems to work. Which one is better? For me, the functional approach was FAR superior. The best pedagogical approach is almost always the one that is the most inspirational, and SICP truly inspired me. I found it to be beautiful, whereas I found the more traditional approach to be merely workmanlike.
Having received both kinds of education, I'm qualified to say which worked better for me. Is my experience representative? Well, lots of people who have learned via this approach seem to agree with me. Zillions of people LOVE SICP. On the other hand, zillions of people swear by imperative approach. The best approach then might vary from individual to individual. There may be no one-size-fits-all education. But I suppose that we cannot rule out that future education researchers might show that on average one approach is better than the other. The Logo people claim to have done such research for children, and they settled on the functional approach. But children are not adults, and I'm sure their research did not reach the level of proven fact.
As to which approach results in engineers who produce the highest quality software, I believe that having a deep understanding of the functional approach results in higher quality software, and the best way to acquire such a deep understanding is to start with it from the very beginning. I am not prepared to prove this assertion, but neither are you prepared to prove its contradiction.
As to which approach is closest to the hardware du jour, who cares? That has nothing to do with anything, unless you are writing in assembly language. I will point out, however, that today's hardware comes with multiple cores, and this tend is only likely to increase. Functional approaches to programming result in very natural extension to multiple cores, while with imperative styles, not so much.
(lol, it isn't, you got me)
What I see in your comments is the constant stream of I's. I, me, I did, I studied, I think this, I think that. Guess what? Nobody cares that much except for you.
When talking about basics, we should consider the least common denominator of all programmers' knowledge. You can reason that the basics should be different, but what if you are wrong? You are a smart guy who loves scala, but there are other smart guys who consider scala a failure, for example. And there are guys smarter than you and me who just do it all in C because they can't be bothered with abstractions, and FP is an abstraction in the end.
People are different, and if you think that you're such an unique yet the most important snowflake - why?
Nobody questions your ability to write successful FP code. So what? What does it prove? Nobody even questions that. But there are people who write FORTH. And there are people who write Prolog. Both groups claim they get much bigger bang for the buck than anyone else. Why do we listen to you and not them?