I went to the University of Texas right before they made this change and I will say that my Programming Language course using Haskell was one of the toughest classes I took there.
I was barely a novice at an imperative language, and all of a sudden I had the comfortable struts of local mutable state ripped out from under me. Having to solve most problems via recursion was incredibly challenging at that stage and I'd be lying if I said I left that class feeling like I understood Haskell.
That course did have the desired effect that Dijkstra was hoping for though. I never programmed functionally in my coursework after that, but it stuck with me and the feeling that "there is something different out there" in the programming language world has forced me to never be satisfied with one language or one approach to solving a problem in my professional life since then.
I was barely a novice at an imperative language, and all of a sudden I had the comfortable struts of local mutable state ripped out from under me. Having to solve most problems via recursion was incredibly challenging at that stage and I'd be lying if I said I left that class feeling like I understood Haskell.
That course did have the desired effect that Dijkstra was hoping for though. I never programmed functionally in my coursework after that, but it stuck with me and the feeling that "there is something different out there" in the programming language world has forced me to never be satisfied with one language or one approach to solving a problem in my professional life since then.