Great question. I would suggest first learning a Lisp (Elisp, Clojure, Scheme, Arc, etc) and then moving to Haskell. With Haskell, you'll be learning more than

Great question. I would suggest first learning a Lisp (Elisp, Clojure, Scheme, Arc, etc) and then moving to Haskell. With Haskell, you'll be learning more than basic lambda calculus. Haskell has a lot of new concepts that traditional-language programmers may have to rewire their brains to think about. Things like lazy evaluation by default, automatic currying, a more advanced type system than most other languages and the concepts that brings like Functors, Monads, and Iteratees. Lazy IO is rough edge which is, as we speak, in the process of being cleaned up by Iteratees. With a Lisp, you can learn the basic concepts of lambda calculus without having to learn more advanced language features at the same time. You'll tackle things like programming in a declarative language and leveraging first-order functions. Remember, you're trading for-loops for recursion, and for some, that's enough brain rewiring without also worrying about lazy IO. Lisp allows you to divide and conquer the multitude of language features functional languages have to offer. Why take them all on at once? Once you're comfortable with Lisp, Haskell's true benefits really start to shine. Haskell is by far my favorite language and I find myself hating programming without the features it offers but I'm not sure I would have made it far enough to see it's benefits without learning Scheme first. And learning Lisp is easy. It's a terse language which one could write a small project in in a few weeks and be ready for Haskell. Haskell is challenging but there's a reason which I'll try to illustrate with an analogy: Calculus is more complex than arithmetic and without a more advanced problem to solve, the added complexity may not be a clear advantage. But you get to a certain point in physics where it simply becomes harder to work in only arithmetic and learning the abstraction of calculus up front pays dividends. Haskell is the same way. I'll end with PG's "The Blub Paradox" http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html (scroll down).