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Ok, have you got any non anecdotal evidence that proves it is "being taught imperatively" that makes imperative programming the "mainstream"? In 11 years I have met very few people who program functionally, and usually those people are good enough to know multiple paradigms. As far as I know most universities teach both.

Most of the universities I have seen or heard about teach C, C++, Java, Python or the like on their courses. Only a subset of them teach also functional languages (which is still quite far from declarativeness, but let's ignore this for the time being), but even those don't require functional programming throughout the whole time and people fall back to imperative languages.

Let's go further. Most of the materials in the internet are about programming in imperative languages. Those are the most popular, including popularity among newcommers.

I have never heard about anybody who started learning programming by learning Lisp, Haskell, OCaml, SML or any other functional language. Similarly I haven't heard about somebody, who learned one of those as his second language and got any proficiency in them.

Please provide any data that contradicts the common sense conclusion (at least common sense for me) that vast majority of people who were taught programming, were taught programming imperatively.

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