Цитата про Хаскел
The University of Melbourne used to teach Haskell as a first language to all the computer science students (they may still, but I'm not there anymore). This worked superbly well. It worked particularly well as a leveller. Those students who'd come into the computer science degree already knowing some other language were neither advantaged by their previous experience or disadvantaged by the bad habits they'd picked up. It gave a nice, sensible introduction into useful things like commenting your code, using meaningful variable names, indenting code to make it readable, breaking bigger problems up into smaller ones, thinking about types etc.
As someone who tutored those first year students, and ran the lab classes; but who also had experience running lab classes for students going straight into C; I think Haskell made a fantastic first language. I'd happily recommend it to a friend who wanted to learn how to program.