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Comment by thomasahle | Hacker News Reader

Haskell us perfectly fine to start with. It's just Haskell + zsh + git + archlinux + vim + cool-tech aren't things you should learn all at once. Heck, 12 years in, and I'm still lot fluent in all of those.

We can still tell people about cool stuff, just encourage them to take one step at a time, in their own time.

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Advice to start learning programming from Haskell or Lisp or C++ is arrogance.

Pefectly fine I one takes full responsibility for own advice.

How so? I'd appreciate you expanding on it, as well as responding to the existence of these:

Teaching Haskell to a 10 year old[0]

Realm of Racket[1]

Land of lisp[2]

0: https://superginbaby.wordpress.com/2015/04/08/teaching-haske...

1: http://realmofracket.com/

2: http://landoflisp.com/

I know Haskell is the introductory programming language of choice at many British universities like Oxford and Cambridge. In the US C, C++ and Scheme (functional) are all in the top 6 most common ( http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/176450-python-is-now-the... ) so I don't see at all why those shouldn't be good choices.

Haskell may not be the wisest language to start with. It's different from almost everything out there.

I feel learning one Algol derived language such as Python followed by Haskell is a good solution. Perhaps even better (of not more painful) would be to learn C followed by Haskell.

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