The computing courses at my university use Haskell in the introductory programming course - apparently it works rather well as a vehicle for exploring algorithms and data structures.
The students move on to Java, C++, Perl, Prolog and others after that; not sure about Python.
The computing courses at my university use Haskell in the introductory programming course - apparently it works rather well as a vehicle for exploring algorithms and data structures.
I think a strict language in the ML family would even be nicer, because students wouldn't have to reason about laziness.
The students move on to Java, C++, Perl, Prolog and others after that; not sure about Python.