My own first language was QBasic and I'm very happy about it. If I'd been made to suffer through parsers instead of putting colorful circles on the screen, I would think of programming as hard work, and that probably wouldn't lead to a very good career.
Computers are to computing science what telescopes are to astronomy, or something. Haskell is a great language for expressing computations, the thing CS is about. It's not meant to flip bits and observe processor states and page faults, if that is your idea of fun. That's more computer engineering stuff.
But Haskell is absolutely capable of drawing pretty circles on the screen in just a couple of lines of code![1]
[1]: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/gloss-1.9.4.1/docs/Graph...
I think Haskell is good at expressing a narrow range of ideas that, honestly, aren't all that fruitful outside the FP field. There are three main reasons why it's not a great language for expressing arbitrary algorithms:
1) It uses the pointer model instead of the integer RAM model. That leads to extra logarithmic factors.
2) Immutability. That's hypothesized to also cause extra logarithmic factors, but AFAIK that's still an open problem.
3) Non-strict evaluation. That wreaks havoc with space complexity, and compositional analysis of performance in general.
Yes, you can add epicycles to remedy these drawbacks (arrays, ST, strictness annotations). But I'd rather use a C-like language in the first place. That's closer to the "core" of CS as I understand it, and that's how most algorithm research is done.
Speaking more pragmatically, outside of CS study, most of the programs I write do not require me to write high-performance algorithms – they tend to be very I/O bound, and call out to external libraries/services for the data crunching. When I need performance (because of course I do at times), there is an amazing library that lets me write C code in Haskell[1]. The fact that some sections of my program is performance critical doesn't mean I have to write the entire program in C. I can write just the performance critical parts in C.
Out of curiosity, what kind of CS do you mostly work with? If it falls under the umbrella of Curry-Howard, then sure, I agree with you. But CS has tons of other areas like graphics, crypto, AI... The impact of Curry-Howard related ideas on these areas has been disappointingly small, IMO.
I don't think it's a good idea because it might discourage a lot of students from the get go and they might simply drop out.
It's well established today that the language you start with has little impact on your mastery of the field years later (most of us started with BASIC I bet), so you might as well start with an easy language that will get people hooked.
If the students are curious and talented, they will move on to more complex things with time.
I think this is true at a lot of universities. I would have thought if you get a random CS grad they're much more likely to have Haskell experience than Go, Ruby, Clojure, etc.
That said, scheme never managed to feel like anything other than a toy language to me, and that we were being fed problems that happened to map neatly into the structure of the language. Write a RPN calculator! Write a Tree Parser! Stuff that really isn't that much harder (but admittedly more verbose) in imperative languages.
I couldn't help but to think "Sure, these problems are easy enough, but how would I blit pixels with this language? How would I process TCP/IP packets? What would a database interface look like? How am I supposed to do error handling?"
In the end I had no desire to integrate Scheme into my day to day programming.
In my university, Programming 101 (mandatory) was (and is) Haskell. For context, there is typically a mix of experience among the class - some will have programmed seriously before, but others will have only studied math.
I had already studied Java, but I found Haskell a delightful re-introduction (it was my first exposure to functional programming) and I see its value as an educational tool.