I think haskell is worth watching. If projects like repa and dph are able to deliver parallel performance speedups, then haskell could become a top choice for

I think haskell is worth watching. If projects like repa and dph are able to deliver parallel performance speedups, then haskell could become a top choice for machine learning and related algorithms. Personally, I have found haskell to be hard to program in initially, but once you get started, refactoring and feature changes feel "easy".