I've taught similar numbers of students C++, and I find Haskell considerably easier to teach (and much easier on the conscience!).
Freshmen innocent of programming experience are increasingly rare, however, so we have to deal mainly with students who've been trained to think not only imperatively but operationally. Their weak program-design skills, and their meager understanding of the excessively complicated languages they're using (C++, Java, ...), result in marathon debugging sessions, which they're been trained to accept as a normal part of software development.
How such students respond to Haskell depends heavily on their attitude. Some feel lost without a debugger, and resist any nudge away from their operational thinking. The more open-minded students, on the other hand, recognize in Haskell a means of expressing computational ideas with far more economy than they are used to, and report that learning Haskell has improved their thinking about programming even if they never use Haskell again.
Whether Haskell would be a good language for a high-school programming class (this thread's original question) depends on the class's goals. If it's intended as vocational training, i.e., direct preparation for employment, then some language more fashionable in industry would probably be appropriate. On the other hand, if it's intended as training in precise thinking, then Haskell can't be beat.
Best,
--Ham
At 3:03 AM +0100 2/4/03, Wolfgang Jeltsch wrote:
On Tuesday, 2003-02-04, 01:01, CET, Hal Daume wrote:[...]However, I'm also well aware that Haskell is very difficult to learn (and, I'd imagine, to teach).Hi,I wouldn't claim that Haskell is very difficult to learn. I think, people often have problems with learning Haskell because they know imperative programming and try to apply their imperative thinking to programming in Haskell. Some months ago, a first year student told me that she liked Haskell very much and that she didn't find it very difficult. I asked her if she had had experiences with other programming languages before learning Haskell. She answered: "No."[...]Wolfgang
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