Want to add a functional language to my toolchest. Haskell or Erlang?

Posted by sean.johnson on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by sean.johnson
Published on 2010-05-25T12:35:30Z Indexed on 2010/05/25 12:41 UTC
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haskell

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functional-programming

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erlang

I've been an OO/procedural guy my whole career except in school where I did a lot of logic programming (Prolog). I work on an amazing variety of projects (freelancer) and so I don't want the tools I know and understand to hold me back from using the right tool for the job. I've decided I should know a functional programming language.

I've narrowed the field to Haskell and Erlang. What are the pros and cons, advantages and disadvantages, and major trade offs of Haskell and Erlang? How do I decide in a rational way, which is the better path? This is a big time investment, so I'd like to chose wisely.

Is there a good case to be made for something else entirely? F#, Scala Ocaml?

(BTW, I'm normally a Ruby/C/Obj.C guy, so I'm not terribly impressed or dependent on the JVM as a runtime. It's completely neutral to me. It's a fine runtime, I don't hold it for or against a language. I don't use Microsoft products though, so a .NET runtime would be a negative.)

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