Eh, same with me and Scheme.<p>I don&#x27;t think functional paradigms can really be appreciated by 1st&#x2F;2nd year undergrads. At that age you are fundamentally impatient to make your mark in a practical sense, your approach will be instinctively imperative. You have to hit the wall (scaling &#x2F; parallelism &#x2F; thread management &#x2F; complexity etc) before you start to really appreciate the upsides of functional paradigms.<p>Unfortunately, a lot of professors are actually terrible educators (after all, they did not get there by teaching but by researching) and think the learning process is as linear as house-building: &quot;place bricks here and there so that your next row will be this way and that way&quot;. They also think people should enjoy programming for programming&#x27;s sake, whereas a lot of people are motivated by a creative process driven by outcomes.