Hello there, actually I did not want to participate in this discussion, but as I have experience teaching many programming languages to many different sorts of people, I feel obligated to share my observations. To someone marginally skilled at logical thinking Haskell appears to be the first choice as the first programming language. I'm offering two experiences as a reference: * I had to teach C++ to a math student. The language was very hard to grasp, because as someone with math skills you practically have to go back to stone age. Instead of writing equations and relationships you have to imagine yourself sitting before a large array of little slips of paper and manipulate them arithmetically to reach the goal you want. Remember that the array is your memory. You don't have a brain in C++. This was about the most difficult part and the whole thing turned out to be a very frustrating endeavor, because you basically have to temporarily forget what you learned in university. * A friend of mine with no technical and no math background wanted to learn programming. I decided to go with Haskell, because it would be an interesting experiment. The experiment turned out to be very successful. As someone with no technical skills you can pick up Haskell simply by logical thinking. For example I never explained laziness. She developed an intuition for it all by herself. She dealed with infinite lists like it was a totally natural thing to have in a computer. I never explained a lot about types, only that types must match when applying a function. Except for "no instance for X"-style type class-related problems the type errors made total sense to her. At the same time I gave workshops for a group of technically skilled people, who had a much harder time grasping Haskell. Their knowledge of how computers work stymied them. While many people claim that following a recipe is the natural way of human thinking, it is surprising what a difficult time people have passing instructions to the machine properly. My conclusion from this and my teaching experience is that humans are good at /following/ recipes but very bad at /making/ them. Humans think in relationships, but can't memorize a lot of them, but exactly this is necessary for imperative programming. Functional programming allows you to view everything in isolation and focus on individual parts of your code without paying attention to the rest. Furthermore imperative language compilers don't know anything about the relationships in your code, so they can't help you a lot. Compilers for a purely functional language on the other hand keep all relationships and derive the recipe from them. GHC compiles to a G-machine, which basically follows an implicit recipe extracted from the functional relationships. Hence you express relationships and the compiler writes the corresponding recipe. This is much easier for the human mind to follow, because you can view everything in isolation. While object-oriented programming languages try to emulate this (poorly) by splitting your imperative program into isolated pieces, a purely functional language takes this idea to its conclusion and enforces it as a first class language feature. This might be a reason why people programming in an imperative language use most of their time for debugging instead of productively writing code. A type system helps, but is very limited in its abilities, because the programmer never gets the opportunity to express relationships. I'm willing to subscribe to this reasoning any time. With this experience in mind my opinion is that a purely functional language is the natural choice for every beginning programmer, before you screw up your mind with an imperative language like Perl, Python or Ruby. Haskell is not a mathematical language. It is a natural language. And /not/ knowing how the machine works actually comes as an advantage for understanding it. Greets, Ertugrul -- nightmare = unsafePerformIO (getWrongWife >>= sex) http://ertes.de/