The ACM Curriculum board has re-opened the 2001 design for review.
Although ACM is a US-based organization, the curriculum is not only
influential at the middle tier of US colleges and universities, it is
also taken seriously by many evolving and developing educational
institutions overseas. In recent years, the study of non-OO PLs, and
of other key PL topics such as type systems, has grown increasingly
marginal in the undergraduate CS curriculum. In particular, the study
of functional programming is not included the ACM CS2001 core. We may
now have an opening to make a small change in this situation.
The ACM Curriculum board has agreed to consider a proposal on
including FP as an equal to OOP (10 "hours" each) in the standard
curriculum. This was the most concrete outcome of the PLC workshop at
Harvard two weeks ago. The proposal was drafted by Stuart Reges,
Shriram Krishnamurthi, and Matthias Felleisen and was endorsed
unanimously by the workshop attendees and by the SIGPLAN Executive
Committee. It proceeds on the premise that inclusion of FP in the core
curriculum is the most important single thing that the PL community
can do for CS education. In particular, this will help prepare
students for a properly designed though possibly optional PL course or
courses.
Please consider contributing comments to the web site. A simple "Yes,
I think this is a great idea" will be helpful. A short explanation is
even better.
There is now a long list of comments supporting this proposal.
However, we have very few comments from people in industry, so
comments from non-academics would be particularly helpful. Examples of
how FP has helped you would, I think, be particularly persuasive.
The web site is http://wiki.acm.org/cs2001/index.php?title=SIGPLAN_Proposal.