I've heard various CS teachers say that, when presented with Haskell as a first language, students took to it like a fish to water and could start writing useful code really fast.
My personal experience is that Haskell isn't really all that complex - when you stick to the core, it's actually fairly simple, with a small set of well thought out features (compared to Scala, for example, which I love but has a lot of features). Strangely enough, what I find hard when dealing with Haskell is the syntax, because it's so different from all the languages I've been taught or taught myself in the past. That shouldn't be a problem for people that have little to no previous experience and tackle it with a virgin mind.
What you said is purely anecdotal. Here's another anecdote I think worth mentioning (it is from a Haskeller who has spent years teaching Haskell to kids):
> this experience has taught me that whenever functional programmers claim that certain things are only unintuitive because programmers have had their minds polluted by non-Haskell programming languages... they are usually wrong.
> the more common claims you see about how purely functional programming is easier and more intuitive for students without previous imperative programming languages. Surprisingly, that's not the case. Even in situations where I don't expect it, I'm constantly fighting everyone's urge to think about situations first and foremost in imperative terms.
I think it's safer to assume that functional approaches have inherent complexity compared to imperative approaches. YMMV, of course.
My personal experience is that Haskell isn't really all that complex - when you stick to the core, it's actually fairly simple, with a small set of well thought out features (compared to Scala, for example, which I love but has a lot of features). Strangely enough, what I find hard when dealing with Haskell is the syntax, because it's so different from all the languages I've been taught or taught myself in the past. That shouldn't be a problem for people that have little to no previous experience and tackle it with a virgin mind.