A more accessible way to do this for trading algorithms would be through Quantopian [1], where they have a crowd-sourced hedge fund that has a similar profit sharing model. You have to have good standing in their contests to be eligible though.

Of course, you can also just use their platform to trade your algorithm with your own money.

[1] https://www.quantopian.com/

I'm interested in some financial programming. Does everyone use Haskell or other functional languages? Where can I learn some basics?

Just emailed you.