Had a similar experience, except we focused on using SML. We went from 15 people down to 3 in the class by the end. I think the tough part is that most of us had zero experience with functional concepts, while the professor couldn't seem to grasp that everything that made complete sense to him, didn't make sense to us.
There's a lot of potential for Khan Academy to make significant impact with this -- I'm not entirely sure JavaScript would be my first choice, but it does present a lower barrier of entry that is ubiquitous and allows people to even mess around straight in their browsers. With JS, you can show people a little bit of both worlds at a time and compare imperative/functional examples (whereas in Haskell, you're stuck with functional, unless you really want to mangle things). It's also a bit more exciting to be able to throw up a little JS creation on the web so that everyone can see, as opposed to writing a program in C and not really being able to show it to people easily without having them run some executables or bringing them to your computer.
One might argue that people who can't make it through Haskell or other "tough languages" shouldn't bother being CS majors -- but we need all kinds of people in the industry and people have many differing interests. There's blue collar work and white collar work even within software engineering.
There's a lot of potential for Khan Academy to make significant impact with this -- I'm not entirely sure JavaScript would be my first choice, but it does present a lower barrier of entry that is ubiquitous and allows people to even mess around straight in their browsers. With JS, you can show people a little bit of both worlds at a time and compare imperative/functional examples (whereas in Haskell, you're stuck with functional, unless you really want to mangle things). It's also a bit more exciting to be able to throw up a little JS creation on the web so that everyone can see, as opposed to writing a program in C and not really being able to show it to people easily without having them run some executables or bringing them to your computer.
One might argue that people who can't make it through Haskell or other "tough languages" shouldn't bother being CS majors -- but we need all kinds of people in the industry and people have many differing interests. There's blue collar work and white collar work even within software engineering.