[Symbiote]

> your approach will be instinctively imperative

Not necessarily (based on being an assistant in lab sessions for first year students learning Haskell).

But what it did do was put everyone on the same level, including the arrogant students who "already knew how to code" and hadn't listened (or attended) the lectures.

I think they chose a functional language to start with good habits for thinking about what to implement, not how to implement it. If you don't know what the problem is, you should work on that, rather than bashing out some Java...