Experiences teaching or learning map/reduce/etc before recursion?
- by Jay
As far as I can see, the usual (and best in my opinion) order for teaching iterting constructs in functional programming with Scheme is to first teach recursion and maybe later get into things like map, reduce and all SRFI-1 procedures. This is probably, I guess, because with recursion the student has everything that's necessary for iterating (and even re-write all of SRFI-1 if he/she wants to do so).
Now I was wondering if the opposite approach has ever been tried: use several procedures from SRFI-1 and only when they are not enough (for example, to approximate a function) use recursion. My guess is that the result would not be good, but I'd like to know about any past experiences with this approach.
