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My first programming course was CS 61A at Berkeley, taught with the textbook Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. I had tinkered around a bit with other languages before that, but hadn't got seriously into programming until that time. I consider myself very fortunate not to have been previously indoctrinated into imperative / stateful programming.

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What language do you work in now? If it is an imperative language do you avoid state as much as possible?

Mostly Python. I do try to avoid mutable state as much as possible, and generally keep things functional (in the sense of functions used for the return values, not their effects). When there is mutable state, keep it as local as possible (within functions or classes).

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