[cdsmith]

It's worth mentioning that the tool this blog post is about defines a simplified version of Haskell's standard library. In particular, there are no type classes exported from Prelude, much less monads or functors. In the end, it's not really any more complex than Scheme, except for syntax.

Now, true, the syntax is much more complicated than Scheme. You can operators and precedence and all that. But while definitely complex, it is mostly consistent with math notation. I tried to teach with Scheme first (following www.bootstrapworld.org) before I created this, and I found the change in syntax from what they are used to can be a real obstacle for children. This is also consistent with the comment about MIT moving to Python, which similarly has much more complex but familiar syntax.