I wouldn’t assume that your colleagues were less capable as undergrads than the students that Dijkstra encountered at UT Austin.

Imperative languages do offer many advantages over Haskell, in that most coursework and industry jobs use them and that, consequently, their ecosystems are much further developed. These advantages are a consequence of university programs' alignment with the imperative and object-oriented programming paradigms, to Oracle's benefit.

Your colleagues having never looked back at lisp is hardly evidence that Haskell would have been too difficult for them or that Oracle didn’t have a hand in this.