At my university the freshman course was, for two years, taught in Haskell. To my eternal shame I managed to dodge most of the first year with a fistful of RPLs, so I never got to sample it.
The result was that lots of students dropped out of computer science and went elsewhere. More than had when being taught something else.
So they switched back to a intro course based on Java (which is their main teaching language for the first two years, C is the second language which is picked up in the 2nd half of the first year). Then you go on to bog-standard Data Structures & Algos / Computational Structures courses, Algo course etc etc which is where you learn the ins and outs of sorting, trees and so forth. Or, in my case, you barely do so because you are a lazy student who didn't do his homework.
The upshot is that you wind up spending most of the intro course teaching the mechanics of Java and motivating students with "interesting" examples. Various graphical geegaws, basically. In such cases students usually aren't using the standard lib, they're using a provided library.
Comments
It depends a lot on the structure of the course.
At my university the freshman course was, for two years, taught in Haskell. To my eternal shame I managed to dodge most of the first year with a fistful of RPLs, so I never got to sample it.
The result was that lots of students dropped out of computer science and went elsewhere. More than had when being taught something else.
So they switched back to a intro course based on Java (which is their main teaching language for the first two years, C is the second language which is picked up in the 2nd half of the first year). Then you go on to bog-standard Data Structures & Algos / Computational Structures courses, Algo course etc etc which is where you learn the ins and outs of sorting, trees and so forth. Or, in my case, you barely do so because you are a lazy student who didn't do his homework.
The upshot is that you wind up spending most of the intro course teaching the mechanics of Java and motivating students with "interesting" examples. Various graphical geegaws, basically. In such cases students usually aren't using the standard lib, they're using a provided library.