[erlang-questions] "Erlang as a First Language" -- crazy? or just stupid?

[Illo de' Illis]

I don't think Mr.Turner needs advice on an alternative language, since he already found erlang to be suitable for the purpose of his class (and by the way I'd like to know in which way erlang is helpful when dealing with cognitive science in respect to other functional languages with distributed support). He's just asking whether teaching it to students who are mostly unaware of computer programming is reasonable.
My very humble opinion is that the somewhat confused mixup of declarative paradigms and the clunky environment could both slow down the learning process and leave students with a bunch of methodological gaps in the way they relate to programming languages. 
I'd really love to hear Mr. Richard O'Keefe's point of view on the matter, though.