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Keywords: Data science education, functional programming
The nature of computing has evolved in the last two decades, with multi-core processors and distributed computing necessitating a new approach to program design. It is easier to take advantage of parallel architectures when writing pure functional programs and learning to think functionally is the key to using the Spark distributed computing platform. Data science curriculum must foster this approach to programming. We argue that the core concepts of functional programming can be introduced in introductory courses using data verbs.