My timeline this morning is a reminder that for most of my career I kept running into barely competent #programmers who feared code, learned a bare minimum and mistrusted the proper use of language features. They were seniors. Team leads. Bosses.

That's how we ended up where we are. You're welcome.

By the time I started poking round in LISP, sometime in the mid 1980s, I had been programming in assembly, FORTRAN, and C for a few years—the weapons of all EE undergrads, in those days. I was #imperative, to the core. Yet, I took to LISP. But I hit the FP wall, when I met ML a bit later.

ML was then far simpler than modern FP languages. Despite being comfortable with LISPy FP, I struggled with the purer MLish FP. With effort, it all clicked. Later in CS grad school, I met early, small Haskell, which was not a big gap for me to cross.

As a grad student, I taught FP, in ML, to upper-level undergrads. Many of them came to the course armed with C or C++, so they faced the same hurdles I did. My personal experience helped me guide them. To my surprise, a few students who took ML as their very first programming language suffered far less. They were lower-level students who lacked programming experience but had already acquired theoretical proficiency. Because they came to ML without imperative prejudices, but armed with theoretical concepts, they got FP immediately.

The #declarative paradigm is indeed a tall step to climb for the imperative #programmers. I would have cracked, had I transitioned from C and Smalltalk directly to Haskell, without the aid from LISP and ML.

Every freshman today enters the CS programme with at least a few years of C++ or Python, usually taught by high school teachers without CS background. And most FP courses now use large, complex, industrial-strength languages like OCaml or Haskell.

In my view, introducing FP using older, smaller, simpler, stabler languages, like R⁴RS Scheme and Standard ML '97, would be far less off-putting to the imperative-minded novices.

#UNIX is not just an OS; it is the ultimate #IDE for #programmers. Arguably the best written introductory book on UNIX programming is "The UNIX Programming Environment", Kernighan (1983). This book covers UNIX V7, but I used it with 4.2BSD.

There is another jewel of a book of a similar kind, a free one to boot, by Prof. Ballesteros (King Juan Carlos University): "Introduction to Operating Systems Abstractions Using Plan 9 from Bell Labs" (2007). Prof. Ballesteros wrote this book to teach his CS students the fundamentals of good OS design.

Although almost no one uses #Plan9 today, it is alive and kicking. It even runs on Raspberry Pi. Anyone interested in OSs and likes the philosophical underpinnings of UNIX should take a look at Plan 9.

The other must-read book is his "Notes on the Plan 9 3ed Kernel Source" (2007).

Prof. Ballesteros has many Plan 9 related publications in PDF format.

https://lsub.org/books-papers/

PS—Those with a historical bent should also read Organick's "The Multics System: An Examination of Its Structure" (1980). Multix is the mother of UNIX, and Plan 9 is the grown-up UNIX.

"Remember that there is a distinction between a programming language and a graphical user interface. Don't confuse snazzy graphics (generated using someone else's libraries and tools) with good programming."

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