Home Felleisen: How to Design Class Hierarchies My talk will instead present a novel approach to the first-year programming curriculum. Specifically, I will explain how a functional semester ideally prepares students for the true essence of object-oriented programming according to Alan Kay: the systematic construction of small modules of code and the construction of programs without assignment statements. Experience shows that these courses prepare students better for upper-level courses than a year of plain object-oriented programming. Initial reports from our students' co-op employers appear to confirm the experiences of our upper-level instructors. (full abstract) We discussed this approach (FP as an introduction to OOP) before. This presentation is from FPDE 2005. Comment viewing options Flat list - collapsed Flat list - expanded Threaded list - collapsed Threaded list - expanded Date - newest first Date - oldest first Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.