As a mechanical engineering PhD student, I haven't had a great pedigree in programming as part of my “day job”. I started out in Matlab (having written some Hypercard and Applescript back in the day, and being introduced to Ada, of all things, in my 1st undergrad year), learned to program—if you can call it that—in (La)TeX; and finally discovered and fell for Mathematica.

Now I'm interested in learning a "real" programming language that I can enjoy in the same sort of style as Mathematica, which tries to stress functional programming since it seems to map more nicely to how certain kinds of mathematics can be written algorithmically.

So which functional language should I learn? I guess the obvious answer is “as many as possible”, but let's start out humble and give a single, well-considered option a good crack. I've heard good things about, say, Haskell and Scala, but I wonder if (given my non–computer science background) I'd be better off starting in more “grounded” territory and going with Ruby or Python (the latter having the big advantage of being used for Sage, which I'd also like to investigate…after my PhD).

Well, I guess this is pretty subjective, so perhaps I could rephrase: would it be better to start looking at Haskell (say) straight after an ad-hoc education to functional programming in Mathematica, or will I get more out of learning Python (say) first?

In reference to the question "what do I want to do with it?", I guess my answer is "fun, and learning more". I've got this list of languages that I'd like to look at, and I don't know how to trim them down. And I'd rather start with something a little higher-level than C simply so that I can be somewhat productive without having to re-invent many wheels for any code I'd like to write.