"We argue that teaching purely functional programming as such in freshman courses is detrimental to both the curriculum as well as to promoting the paradigm. Instead, we need to focus on the more general aims of teaching elementary techniques of programming and essential concepts of computing. We support this viewpoint with experience gained during several semesters of teaching large first-year classes (up to 600 students) in Haskell. These classes consisted of computer science students as well as students from other disciplines. We have systematically gathered student feedback by conducting surveys after each semester. This article contributes an approach to the use of modern functional languages in first year courses and, based on this, advocates the use of functional languages in this setting. "
Leksah is a Haskell IDE (Integrated Development Environment) written in Haskell based on Gtk+ and gtk2hs. Leksah is a practical tool to support the Haskell development process. It is platform independent and runs on any platform where GTK+, gtk2hs and GHC can be installed. It is currently been tested on Windows and Linux but it should work on the Mac. It works with the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC).
Leksah is completely free and distributed under the Gnu Public License 2.0