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I have used all three languages professionally—Haskell & some OCaml at Facebook, and some F# at Xamarin—and would recommend learning Haskell. There’s a strong

I have used all three languages professionally—Haskell & some OCaml at Facebook, and some F# at Xamarin—and would recommend learning Haskell. There’s a strong community around Haskell, with a decent library ecosystem and high-quality implementations, and learning it will make it easy to pick up F# or OCaml—the reverse is not necessarily true. F# is a decent choice if you want to write functional code in .NET land, but Visual Studio and MonoDevelop support for F# aren’t as good as for C#. OCaml is a good language, but I would recommend against it. Like F#, it has some syntactic and semantic conveniences that Haskell lacks. However, the community is small, there are relatively few libraries, and the runtime falls down when you need to do anything with large arrays or floating-point math.

codygman 12y ago
> OCaml is a good language, but I would recommend against it. Like F#, it has some syntactic and semantic conveniences that Haskell lacks. I haven't had a chance to use OCaml or F# yet, what syntactic and semantic conveniences are you talking about?
- evincarofautumn 12y ago
  For example, OCaml has an object system (the “O”), polymorphic variants (somewhere between ADTs and symbols), parameterised/first-class modules, and named/optional function parameters. A lot of these things have suitable replacements in Haskell, they’re just not in the language directly. And of course, Haskell has plenty of features that OCaml and F# lack, such as pervasive purity, typeclasses, and an array of useful advanced type system features. It’s tradeoffs all the way down. :)