[OT] Teaching Haskell in High School

[John Peterson]

I've also been working high school students a bit and functional
programming is a great way to teach the principals of computation.
The best results come when FP is applied to domains that get kids
excited.  I've had very good luck with Haskore as an excellent way to
bring computation to a general audience.  I'm also working on a
student friendly version of Pan that should be releasable in a few
more weeks.

The downside of Haskell is that none of the regular implementations
(ghc, hugs) are really right for this level of student.  Type
inference is an especially nasty problem.  There also a number of
gotcha's lurking in the language that cause problems.  But even so
with a little supervision everything works quite well.

I think fundamentals of computing as found in Haskell are good for a
general mathematics class as opposed to a "computer" class where you
have to deal with curriculum defined by the AP test or intertwined
with some specific software environment.

  John