Also. I suspect that some people will find learning to program a bit easier with functional programming languages like Haskell. When learning Haskell, I wrote lots of simple functions, and acheived more complex results by stringing together lots of simple functions. In imperative languages, it's a bit harder to test all the individual pieces as you're going.

The type system of Haskell is quite restrictive for beginners (it's a little annoying to not be able to debug by putting a print anywhere, or read user input wherever you want) and the laziness can be a little unintuitive, especially for people who haven't done much mathematics (e.g. ones = 1:ones... "I'm defining something in terms of itself, aghafghfg").

But, I do agree that functional languages might be easier to teach to certain groups of people, like those who have done a fair bit of maths, and that Haskell has some very neat features for learning to program (GHCi and Hoogle are awesome!).