Functional Languages

Haskell is good because of its strong, static and highly expressive type system
Lisps are good because everything is so simple that nothing stands in expressing your intent. They're perhaps not as good at building robust software as proper functional languages, but they're unparalleled in terms of scripting and prototyping.

Scheme for being allowed to sit at the SICP cool kids table
OCaml if you want to be smug about being to be functional AND imperative (and trigger Haskell sour grapes fags)

Written a static site gen in Haskell 2 years ago, and 10 years ago an PHP/ASP/etc-like templating engine in Lisp. The answer is "anything you want". (You better stick with systems-langs where highest-perf is your number 1 priority of course.)

Interesting post
>SML has no libraries
yea I don't know either where this comes from.
The standard library is quite alright. It even has IO, portable system interfaces and sockets.
And there are also huge collections of various algorithms and data structures in SML, so you don't even need to use the ffi for many things.
sourceforge.net/p/tom7misc/svn/HEAD/tree/trunk/sml-lib/
github.com/seanmcl/sml-ext

c

C isn't functional, it doesn't even have closures.

You have first class functions though, and you can make your functions referentially transparent if you really wanted to.

Function pointers are not first class functions.

Scala
It's like Java's non retarded hot sister

why not?
you can store them in variables, pass them around to other functions, and all the stuff you'd expect from a first class citizen.
The only thing you can't do is currying, but that's because C is not built on the lambda calculus.

There are a lot of things about scala that are plenty retarded dude. Java is slowly starting to become the less retarded scala once again.

Clojure is a JVM functional language that was a real pleasure to use for me personally

You can't define nested functions, for starters. First class citizens are no different from any other data type in terms of things you can and can't do, and that's a difference.
It's also standard (generally but also in C) that you can use variables that are in scope for the initialization of any first class data object, so it therefore follows that closures are mandatory for functions to be considered first class.

good point

what are some good haskell books for a hobbyist that aren't 2000 pages?

What hobby you have and why you need haskell for it?

I don't really need Haskell for anything, I just want something to fuck around with in my spare time and it'll purely be a time waster. I sometimes use Scilab at work to help me with tedious tasks and will probably continue to use Scilab there.
I fell in love with Brainfuck some time ago, and that's been my go to time waster for the last few months, but I feel like I'm approaching the limits of interesting things to do in it that my brain can comprehend.
I've used C++ a little, but it's not really that interesting to fuck around with.
I saw a short introduction to haskell and what it's about the other day, and to me it seems like a fun programming language (with a higher ceiling of potential than Brainfuck) to fuck around in

tl;dr: I'm just looking for a hobby that requires a bit more brain power than videogames

>hates javascript even though it powers the web

Such a loser.

JavaScript is garbage. The web should have been powered by Scheme as was planned.

>I just want something to fuck around with in my spare time and it'll purely be a time waster.
Get a girlfriend.

you have been le epic trolled, faggot

but they cost money and requre a personality to aquire

learn about dependent types. I'd say the really cool stuff you can model/do in fp is not evident until you have them. agda is a good language for that.

>Clojure shill incoming.

Clojure is a functional Lisp that compiles to Java bytecode. It has a sibling dialect Clojurescript that targets Javascript. It has built-in primitives for concurrent programming, including aping all of Go's gochannels as a library.

There are literally dozens of us here!

> For the Javascript flamewarriors:

Can I introduce you to Clojurescript? For everybody who has worked on Javascript, watch this video from 7:30 to ~10:00.

youtu.be/j-kj2qwJa_E?t=7m31s

If you want to create web apps, elm is also worth looking into.

For many it's also a gateway drug into Haskell, as it's much easier to learn

>Clojure
I found clojure really hard to get into.
When starting out you first find out about Lein. So you need to set up that first. I wanted to use it in emacs and have a lein repl in it, because that's what I like from other lisps. But there are different guides for that and they all tell things a little differently, which is just annoying and time-consuming when you just want to get started.
Furthermore, when you look for libraries you often find abandoned projects that barely got started before people apparently just lost interest.
Also, the error messages are a pain. The lein repl shows the complete stacktrace and it always took me some time to figure out what was actually wrong. This is especially a problem when initially learning the language and you're unsure about some concepts.

It felt like Clojure really needs a bigger community or something. The language itself is so nice, but all the tooling around it is not quite there yet.

Erlang

WHAT THE FUCK IS A MONAD AND WHY DO I NEED TO USE IT

Attached: 1505273428111.jpg (520x718, 70K)

>WHAT THE FUCK IS A MONAD
As far as functional programming is concerned, a typeclass instance with a bind and return function that follows the monad laws.
>WHY DO I NEED TO USE IT
If it follows those laws then it happens to have the perfect semantics for modelling side effects, which is something you can't otherwise do in a pure language.