Ask HN: Which is the best functional Programming language?
I'm starting with functional programming language. Which do you suggest? Haskell, Scala, F# or any other. Please list any books.
Scala is easier to learn if you know Java, and has excellent IDE support in both Eclipse and Intellij IDEA. "Programming in Scala" is a good introduction and reference for Scala (http://www.artima.com/shop/programming_in_scala), but doesn't cover the new features in Scala 2.8.
I had good experiences with OCaml also (which compiles down to machine code, so has the potential to be faster than Scala if performance is critical). I believe it has more advanced tail-recursion optimizations. It seemed that floating point arithmetic was slow because each number had to be stored on the heap separately.
As I learned erlang and OTP I kept finding design choices I really appreciated.
The pragmatic programmers book on erlang was written by the creator of the language and I think is one of the better programming books ever. Clearly he's spent several decades teaching this language to perplexed students, cause he found the right way to illuminate it.