[depoisfalamos]

In the university where I attend, Universidade do Minho (Portugal), functional programming it's the first programming class freshmen are given, computer science and informatics engineering students alike. It is a very effective way to teach programming, structures and a lot of math theory behind it. It also helps students who didn't come from "professional schools" where they teach C or Java to be in the same level as those who did. The language they teach here is Haskell. We have 3 classes during our course where we work with Haskell. It may seem a very academic language, geared to research, but the real world usage has grown very much in the recent years. Not only Haskell but earlang and lisp as well. So I think it's a great way to introduce the concepts to first year students and "first comers" to 'our' (dark :p) side.