At the University of Edinburgh, the first programming class we do in first year is an introduction to functional programming, which uses Haskell as the main lan

At the University of Edinburgh, the first programming class we do in first year is an introduction to functional programming, which uses Haskell as the main language (it helps that Phil Wadler is the lecturer). Lots of students take to it much more easily than Java which is taught in the following semester. It definitely seems that viewing Haskell as a "hard" language is a product of an imperative programming education.