Picking a Language for Functional Feb #12in23

I’m still in the process of selecting a functional language for February. What are the criteria you would use to recommend one or the other?

I see Haskell is a classic and someone recommended a MOOC above. I’m also considering Scala since my day job involves Java and there seem to be good books and resources to pick it up.

Saw Elixir is another option.

But still at a bit of a loss as to what to pick. Still trying to get an idea of what they’re used for and how high the learning curve for any of them might be. Improved job prospects would be a nice side effect, but not the only thing I’m considering. Mostly want to learn and have fun.

That would be me. I would not start with Haskell. The Elixir course on Exercism is really good and would not need much outside material.

If you want to build upon Java, you can also try out Clojure. Great tooling and a very welcoming community. If you take the StackOverflow survey, more money is made with Clojure than Haskell or Scala, but that might be biased by the time people have already spent in the industry when they have scored a Clojure job.

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