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Comment by hyper_reality | Hacker News Reader

It's funny you posted this, because today was examination day for the 'Functional Programming in Miranda' course at University College London, one of the last institutions to actually teach a course in Miranda.

Indeed, it's a great stepping stone to Haskell, with many of the important functional concepts but without some advanced (albeit useful) stuff like monadic programming.

One of the downsides is the ancient Mira console, which can output cryptic error messages, and which doesn't have command history out the box. Nevertheless, it's lightyears faster to start than GHCI, so good for learning.

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> and which doesn't have command history out the box

SML/NJ had the same issue; you can use rlwrap[0] to fix that.

[0]: https://linux.die.net/man/1/rlwrap

The University of Windsor used it in their first year intro to CS course up until 2015. I wonder how many other places still use it.

Interesting, is Haskell used in many universities?

I'm not sure, honestly. It would be nice if it were.

UCL teaches other courses using Haskell (http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/students/syllabus/undergrad/101p_pri...), and Imperial College London uses it for teaching functional programming too (http://www.imperial.ac.uk/computing/current-students/courses...).

Multiple universities (at least Utrecht and Nijmegen) in the Netherlands use Haskell for teaching functional programming, and I believe some FP research is also carried out there using Haskell.

Radboud University actually switched to Haskell this year, now that Ralf Hinze is teaching the functional programming course. Before they used to teach Clean (which is not that different from Haskell).

Oxford also taught a few courses in Haskell:

- Functional Programming - Digital Systems - Principals of Programming Languages.

Compilers was primarily in OCaml, and there were several other courses in Scala.

UT Austin used Haskell as the intro freshman language until pressure from large regional donors/employers caused them to switch to Java in the early 2000s.

Yup I learned it there. It's there for the basics of CS like learning recursion they don't really mention if it is functional tbh.

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