What are the best languages for learning functional programming?

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score 114 · Accepted Answer

Haskell

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Haskell is really popular in universities and academia as a tool to teach programming. A lot of books for people who don't know programming are written around Haskell. This means that there are a lot of resources for beginners in programming with which to learn Haskell and functional programming concepts. See More

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The Best 1 of 26 OptionsWhy?

My Recommendation for Haskell

My Recommendation for Haskell

Forces you to learn pure functional programming

Difficult learning curve

Open source

Language extensions lead to unfamiliar code

Highly transferable concepts

You have to learn more than just FP

Mathematical consistency

Symbols everywhere

Referentially transparent

Package manager is unstable & lacking features

Very few language constructs

Lazily evaluated

Quick feedback

You need some time to start seeing results

Hand-writeable concise syntax

Curried type signatures obfuscate what were the in and out types originally

Functions curry automatically

Only pure functional programming

Easy to read

Documentation for most packages is short and lacking

Easy syntax for people with a STEM degree

Too academic, hard to find "real world" code examples

Powerful categorical abstractions

Popular in teaching

25 Other Options Considered

My Recommendation for Elm

My Recommendation for Elm

Compile errors are human-friendly

Missing syntactic sugar ('where' clauses, pattern guards)

The Elm architecture offers a simple pattern for all programs

Not quite Haskell semantics

Growing community

No higher-kinded types.

Easier to make front ends than JS

Avoids advanced FP topics such as Monads

Reactive programming is baked in

No run-time exceptions

Time-travelling debugger and Hot-swapping of code

Inferred static typing

Static module system

Good tooling

Good documentation

Great and simple way to learn Purely Functional Programming

Super easy refactoring with very helpful compiler errors

Designed around high-level front-end development

Tailor-made for games

Simpler syntax than Haskell

High-level Functional-Reactive Code

My Recommendation for Elixir

My Recommendation for Elixir

Great documentation

Deployment is still not as easy as it should be

Great for concurrency

Some design choices may seem strange

Great getting started tutorials

Syntax is similar to Ruby, making it familiar for people used to OOP

Powerful metaprogramming

Full access to Erlang functions

Scalability

Easy to download libraries

Types don't get in the way

My Recommendation for Scheme

My Recommendation for Scheme

Simple syntax

Fragmented ecosystem

Great, well known textbooks available

Not purely functional

Great at teaching fundamental programming ideas

No Magic - it's clear how everything works

Multiparadigm

Great, well known textbooks

Robust metaprogramming

Many different implementations for different domains

Multi platform

Easy flow follow up

Definition of functional language

My Recommendation for F#