Neither is a bad choice. I'm partial to Clojure, specifically because it does integrate well with every Java library known to man. Starting out, there's a rea

Neither is a bad choice. I'm partial to Clojure, specifically because it does integrate well with every Java library known to man. Starting out, there's a real Pavlovian benefit in being able to do something cool that "just works", and figure out the underlying principles later. It's fairly easy to take Clojure and integrate it with your machine learning library of choice, or a web framework, or Hadoop. Haskell has some of those libraries as well, but the advantage is that from the beginning you're exposing yourself to polyglot programming and it's easier to mix in some raw Java, or JRuby, or Jython...