Besides Haskell, lots of rubyists have diversified into clojure, scala, and erlang. FP is a powerful paradigm, you can start looking at STM and actor models.

Besides Haskell, lots of rubyists have diversified into clojure, scala, and erlang. FP is a powerful paradigm, you can start looking at STM and actor models. There's 3 main FP "lineages", lisp, haskell and ML. Also, F# is a really nice implementation from what I've read about it (I haven't bought VS 2010 yet). To be fair, when you're getting into concurrent structures, you have a fundamental conflict with the OP's criteria. (Scala and haskell will teach you a lot about language design.) "less of an emphasis on, e.g., doing things "the right way", programming language theory, strict enforcement of rules" ------------- Some other language i find interesting, tho i haven't written much or any code: factor, ioke, objective-C, J, common lisp, scheme ------------ sounds like you shd go to emerging languages: http://emerginglangs.com/speakers/ http://emerginglangs.com/speakers/