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Functional means different things to different people. By all means learn Clojure, but also learn a functional language with a first-class type system (e.g. Haskell).



Ah, Haskell. I find it equal parts fascinating and scary. I definitely won't start at Haskell, although I would surely want to come to it at some point of time. Static typing looks nice.


OCaml might be a friendlier option (though you'll want HKTs eventually, and the syntax is a bit ugly), or maybe Ceylon if you're willing to go a bit less mainstream. (I'm a Scala programmer myself, but I can't really recommend it unless you're already familiar with the JVM and its oddities, there are a lot of warts that have to be there for Java compatibility).

But yeah, there's the Lisp tradition and the typed tradition and they're almost entirely separate, but through accidents of history we call them both "functional". So in the same way that you'd learn an OO language and a functional language, I'd say it's worth learning one of each.




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