If we were talking about teaching programming to kids, I actually agree with you. It wasn't clear from the top-level comment that started this thread if that's what we were talking about though. I thought that we were talking about intro to CS for freshmen in college. That's where I think it might be valuable to start with functional programming. Note: might -- I really don't know.
"People should be required to learn the basics of programming first. They should start with immutable data objects"
We weren't talking about freshmen in college. And talking about freshmen in college is not so interesting because they agreed to listen to bullshit (information of questionable utility) by joining college.
It's much more interesting to talk about kids or adults because they have the choice.
