What is your favorite book or paper or web page that describes (to beginners) what functional programming is and what is its core ideas? I would enjoy seeing perhaps a historical account (but for beginners). I’d like to compose a few paragraphs to attract non-experts to a one-semester introductory course on functional programming. (Perhaps I could just quote instead of writing them. In fact, I would prefer to do that.)
Hughes’s “Why Functional Programming Matters” is a classic: https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/dat/miranda/whyfp90.pdf\|https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/dat/miranda/whyfp90.pdf
It’s not an answer to your question, but the first thing I always say to anyone who asks about “functional programming” generally is: “What do you mean by functional programming?”
I have found that people have a lot of different ideas of what is functional programming. Some of which are mutually exclusive (e.g. people saying Haskell is pretty much the apex of FP, which contradicts all the people who correctly point out that LISP was FP before the ML family of languages came into being - that’s also not to say that Haskell isn’t FP, though)
Not an introduction, but maybe you can get some ideas: https://wiki.haskell.org/Research_papers/Functional_pearls