[_delirium]

That does require that the right way is right! Harper is quite intelligent, but I think his particular views on what constitutes the "right way" to do programming are decidedly minority ones, even among academic computer scientists. Some have relatively large minority support (his views on FP are common among PLs researchers), but others get more and more into small-minority territory. He essentially believes that ML does things right or close to right, while every other language is horribly broken (Haskell somewhat less broken than others, but still fatally flawed), which isn't a very common view. His views on dynamic languages, OO, automata theory, and anything else that isn't FP are also quite partisan and often not widely held.

I'm a bit uncomfortable with a partisan approach to an intro-level course, that presents the "correct" way to do things according to one particular professor's views. That sort of partisan-indoctrination-as-curriculum is something people rightfully complain about in some humanities departments. I don't think we'd do well in CS to follow their lead, with different universities teaching different partisan versions of CS 101, trying to convince their students that the "ML way" or the "Haskell way" or the "OO way" or the "Lisp way" is the one and only right way to do programming.