I’m going to echo the Haskell recommendations. Just get started. I was also overwhelmed by how convoluted the language seemed but eventually used it for a proj

I’m going to echo the Haskell recommendations. Just get started. I was also overwhelmed by how convoluted the language seemed but eventually used it for a project, and my opinion completely changed. Haskell is a simple, beautiful language that enjoys great tooling. Start out by learning just enough IO and monad stuff so that you can read input and pass it to your functions. This will not take long. Then you can gradually build up your knowledge of the language by creating modules that will become more and more idiomatic with time. You will discover parametrized types, laziness, and user-defined operators. At times you will struggle with how to use the type system to achieve your goal, but through practice, you will learn how it limits you, so you will know what approach to take. Eventually you might notice that your code could be easier to read and write, and that’s where monads come in. Somebody in this thread also recommended Clojure, which is a fine language that I would have also recommended a few months ago—it was my go-to language for spinning up servers or doing some computation. Now that I have tried Haskell though, I feel like I might not need to use Clojure again because Haskell is much more fun. So I’d hate for someone else to miss out on the fun like I did for years because they think they have to read a 600-page treatise just to get started! It’s very far from the truth.