Don't get me wrong, I certainly think that functional programming has its place in the world, but as a first year uni student all fired up about finally learning "real" programming after years of teaching myself (back before the internet laid everything out on a platter), I was not impressed.
I don't think functional paradigms can really be appreciated by 1st/2nd year undergrads. At that age you are fundamentally impatient to make your mark in a practical sense, your approach will be instinctively imperative. You have to hit the wall (scaling / parallelism / thread management / complexity etc) before you start to really appreciate the upsides of functional paradigms.
Unfortunately, a lot of professors are actually terrible educators (after all, they did not get there by teaching but by researching) and think the learning process is as linear as house-building: "place bricks here and there so that your next row will be this way and that way". They also think people should enjoy programming for programming's sake, whereas a lot of people are motivated by a creative process driven by outcomes.
Not necessarily (based on being an assistant in lab sessions for first year students learning Haskell).
But what it did do was put everyone on the same level, including the arrogant students who "already knew how to code" and hadn't listened (or attended) the lectures.
I think they chose a functional language to start with good habits for thinking about what to implement, not how to implement it. If you don't know what the problem is, you should work on that, rather than bashing out some Java...
