up in the long run.
i think it is pretty hard to convince students focused on the here-and-now of a lot of things. however, the teacher's job is to teach them what they need to know, not just what they want to know.
there are two reasons for learning a functional language. the most important is that anything that gets you to think hard about something new will make you better at other things as well. if you want your body to be strong you do something like run hard and long so that you sweat and collapse at the end of it (or nearly). if you want to be smart, do 