FWIW I learned on BASIC. "GOTO" looks natural to me. It's also much closer to the machine. Structured programming is a prettification of test-and-jump, and you

FWIW I learned on BASIC. "GOTO" looks natural to me. It's also much closer to the machine. Structured programming is a prettification of test-and-jump, and you have to be able to see through it, to use it well. Functional programming, on the other hand, is a bit of a conceptual leap away from the metal. If you're mapping two functions over a stream of data how many loops is it? In a dumb language like Ruby, it will be as many as your map() calls. But in Haskell, it will fuse them into one loop doing two operations. And the thing with functional programming is, you're not supposed to care - except, you do have to. Generating an endless unresolved series of thunks in Haskell is a beginner mistake. But if you can't see through the functional list-flipping to the generation and consumption of callable heap objects in a test-and-jump cycle, you're going to be scratching your head. My answer would be to teach both assembler and FP, and step up and down simultaneously. Start on Excel and move to Haskell, while also starting on 6502 or some such toy assembler, and moving to C, and meet in the middle at Scheme.