It was designed to a small extend to be used during CS studies. Witness some of those functions in prelude that will crash app on incorrect input, which could be trivially improved to total versions. Those where defined they way they are because it ease teaching.

I was not there, so I can not tell if Haskell comity had any thought put into teaching younger audiences.

However, Haskell was never, ever meant for teaching The Programming. It was always about lazy evaluation and static type system.

In deed, here in lies the trap. Python programmer expect different foundation to be laid during programming course to R programmer, to Prolog programmer to Haskell programmer to Clojure programmer.

There is no introductory programming course. We specialize from get go, and its only through learning multiple languages and/or advanced concepts that we generalize ;)