Haskell is really the intersection of functional programming and static typing at the highest level, and these are 2 very different things, and it will be very

Haskell is really the intersection of functional programming and static typing at the highest level, and these are 2 very different things, and it will be very easy to get lost in the typing aspect for fear of not grasping the functional aspect. If your goal is to teach just functional programming, then Haskell may be too much since the language is about a lot more than just functional programming. Scheme or a light lisp (including Clojure) is often the way FP is initially taught, since you can focus directly on the functional aspects and leave the complexities of static typing out of it. This was the tradition at MIT for a long time (maybe still is).