I have a math background, and I've found Haskell to be very confusing. There's a lot of syntax that's not like other programming languages or mathematics, whic

I have a math background, and I've found Haskell to be very confusing. There's a lot of syntax that's not like other programming languages or mathematics, which makes programs very dense and hard to read. (Perl and Ruby suffer from similar problems.) I'd encourage you to try Python. Its syntax is simple, natural, powerful, and very similar to mathematical notation (I'm thinking of list comprehensions). If you want to use Python for mathematics -- in the sense of an open-source replacement for Maple/Mathematica -- I recommend Sage [1]. [1] http://sagemath.org http://sagemath.org