I have fond recollections of learning to program in Caml (this was in 1997). Without ever being “indoctrinated” to FP (I only recently made the connection to FP), we learned recursion, list manipulation, pattern-matching and currying before loops. Tail-recursion was the standard way to write a function. I don’t think teaching the same concept to first year students would be as easy in Haskell (although I only know the language from LYAH)