>Students should have significant programming experience in Scheme, Common Lisp, Haskell, CAML or other "functional" language.
>This subject is appropriate for undergraduates who have the prerequisite experience.
I know that the MIT have different standards than the rest of us, but how many students even meet this criteria?
Quite a few as it's an "OR" not an "AND". Maybe not that many frosh, but it's a graduate class.
I took quite a few grad classes in my last two academic years at the institute. And I even did OK in some of them. At least back then you could register for almost anything if you could get the professor to believe you wouldn't hold things back. I could imagine that hasn't changed.
Depends on the university. Some place functional languages in the initial 2-4 course sequence which would make this an appropriate course for their students. Many others relegate functional languages to a "programming paradigms" course, which would make it less appropriate for their students.
At the university I went to, all intro to CS classes were taught in a functional language: Scheme for the standard intro classes and SML/Haskell for the honors intro classes. I imagine that this true at a significant number of universities.
>This subject is appropriate for undergraduates who have the prerequisite experience. I know that the MIT have different standards than the rest of us, but how many students even meet this criteria?