I've heard from multiple people teaching Haskell that it's much easier to grasp for people with no prior programming experience compared to those with one or more languages under their belt. It makes sense on some level - core Haskell is about taking plain data and transforming it into something else. Much easier to explain than public static enterprise beans. I think that learning Java/Python/JavaScript/C#/PHP as a first language burdens you with too much baggage, while a lot of what Haskell teaches can be successfully applied regardless of what language you end up working with.

It's truly unfortunate that Haskell got the reputation of being mainly about monoids in the category of endofunctors, and zygohistomorphic prepromorphisms. The core principles are simple, solid, and lend themselves well to writing production code.