You want to teach functional programming to someone else: To enable a fellow developer to hack in your project, as a professional trainer, or to teach students. You are enthusiastic that functional programming is the best, and you probably feel that Haskell, OCaml, Erlang, Clojure, Scala, Swift, F#, Racket or Scheme is the best in particular. However, as natural as functional programming feels to us, it is not easy to teach well. In particular, the languages listed above are powerful tools for development, but they are not necessarily the best tools for teaching - at least in the beginning. The tutorial will help you teach functional programming well, in a variety of contexts, using the Program by Design Approach. It will give an overview of effective teaching approaches, techniques and tools, and highlight pitfalls and aspects of teaching worthy of your attention.

Mike Sperber is CEO of Active Group, a software consultancy in Tübingen, Germany that develops software for client projects using functional programming. He has a long history of publishing on functional programming, including many research papers, and was the project editor for the R6RS standard for the Scheme programming language. He has also developed an introductory course in programming in use at several German universities, based on the PLT group’s Program by Design approach. He also co-authored (with Nicole Rauch and Lars Hupel) the curriculum on Functional Software Architecture for iSAQB.