Students want to do internships after their freshman year(!) and that's where the pressure to use "real" languages comes from
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FWIW when I was a freshman at the intro CS course was taught in Haskell. This was 1997. I INCREDIBLY benefited from this and am so grateful that UT did this.
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unfortunately as a professional Haskell programmer I would never recommend subjecting any student to any modern version of GHC ;)
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"Ok kiddos, for HW1 you're going to have to enable these 99 extensions"
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My knowledge of Haskell is from 1997, but it seemed really good back then.
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It's a really fantastic language. It's just also a laboratory for the best cutting-edge type systems research, so some of its dark corners can get a bit spooky.
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it’s also just… really big and has a million different configuration options and extremely intimidating (information-rich) type errors and just generally very much suffers from all the problems industrial-strength languages have that I alluded to at the start of the thread
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The instructor of my undergrad PL course creates his own Prelude now because one surely don't want the students to confuse [(a,b)] with [(1,2),(3,4)] and also deal with Foldable t => t a -> Int. #lang teaching-language makes sense.
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One thing that would be interesting to consider is how to avoid students feeling inferior for having to use the `#lang teaching-language`… maybe it's enough to properly set expectations/understanding at the beginning of the course? Or maybe be careful of what you call it?
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There's also the issue of students going off and searching online for answers, and being frustrated at the lack of resources for `teaching-lang`. Maybe having some tips around what they should expect when searching online would help?
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Or you might design some really good pedagogy around Haskell (for instance), have a prelude with nice custom type errors and a gentle on-ramp, but then students might go off and search online for answers, getting confused by the monad tutorials and folks complaining about purity.