Well, I'm a little biased, but I would learn Haskell. It's the one I learned first--in fact, I learned it during my very first college CS course. (The course, c

Well, I'm a little biased, but I would learn Haskell. It's the one I learned first--in fact, I learned it during my very first college CS course. (The course, coincidentally, was in Scheme.) If I managed it as a freshman, it can't be all that difficult :P. Haskell has a couple of very good freely available books: Learn You a Haskell[1] and Real World Haskell[2]. I also found Write Yourself a Scheme in 48 Hours[3] very helpful. When I was learning OCaml, I could not find any terribly good resources. That said, it wasn't much of an issue, so I didn't look too hard--learning OCaml after knowing Haskell is very easy. There is going to be a Real World OCaml book at some point, but I think it's still a work in progress. [1]: http://learnyouahaskell.com/ http://learnyouahaskell.com/ [2]: http://book.realworldhaskell.org/ http://book.realworldhaskell.org/ [3]: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_Hours http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_H... I also think Haskell is good because it's more of a departure from languages you're probably used to. You can't sink back into your old habits, because everything is done completely differently. Of course, some people find it helpful to have less of a departure from what they're used to, so perhaps you might prefer OCaml because it's less different from normal languages. I use Haskell for my own projects (and, this semester, for research), and I used OCaml for an internship this summer. I think that for most tasks, they're roughly equally suited. If you want to do multicore concurrent or parallel code, I think Haskell has the edge, but I have not really done much of that in either language. OCaml has a very good JavaScript compiler called js_of_ocaml[4]. While Haskell does have some options for JavaScript as well like Fay[5] or UHC[6], I don't think it's quite as nice. I used js_of_ocaml during my internship and was very happy with it. So for web stuff, I'd probably go for OCaml. Both OCaml and Haskell have good backend web frameworks, but I haven't really used any of them. [4]: http://ocsigen.org/js_of_ocaml/ http://ocsigen.org/js_of_ocaml/ [5]: http://fay-lang.org/ http://fay-lang.org/ [6]: http://www.cs.uu.nl/wiki/UHC http://www.cs.uu.nl/wiki/UHC If you happen to be on windows, installing OCaml is a pain. Haskell, with the Haskell Platform[7] should be much easier, but I haven't tried it myself. [7]: http://www.haskell.org/platform/ http://www.haskell.org/platform/ OCaml has a really good Emacs mode called typerex[8]. Haskell has some alternatives like ghc-mod[9] and scion[10], but I've never been able to get them to work. Admittedly, typerex was not easy to install either. [8]: http://typerex.org/ http://typerex.org/ [9]: http://www.mew.org/~kazu/proj/ghc-mod/en/ http://www.mew.org/~kazu/proj/ghc-mod/en/ [10]: https://github.com/nominolo/scion https://github.com/nominolo/scion Ultimately, you wouldn't go wrong with either one. Moreover, the core ideas are fairly transferable between the two: you'll find that learning OCaml after Haskell or Haskell after OCaml is relatively easy. I would lean towards Haskell, but it's not a big deal. I just realized that I've written a whole bunch of paragraphs to say very little: either language is a great choice and I just happen to like Haskell more. Hopefully this is not too much of a deluge of information :P.