TL;DR: The thing that surprised me most wasn't which language students struggled with — it was when they struggled. TAing an intro CS course using Racket, I watched students hit a wall on recursion around week three, then suddenly click and start writing elegant list processors by we

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What's in this article

The Setup: Two Semesters, Two Languages, Very Different Pain

Getting Both Installed Without Losing Your Mind

Where Scheme Wins: The First Two Weeks of a Functional Course

Where Haskell Wins: Once Students Need to Think in Types

The Honest Rough Edges of Each

Head-to-Head: Scheme vs Haskell by Use Case

When to Pick Scheme

When to Pick Haskell

The Setup: Two Semesters, Two Languages, Very Different Pain

The thing that surprised me most wasn't which language students struggled with — it was when they struggled.…