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Comment by misiti3780 | Hacker News Reader

you obviously know lisp and might be biased but i have a serious question, if i was going to waste a bunch of time learning a functional language in 2019 and wanted to use it in production (I am in consulting, so I would be recommending this to my clients) would you learn

1. LISP 2. Haskell 3. Erlang 4. Something else

No wrong answer, just a question I always like to hear answers to.

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Not GP, but: I recommend Standard ML. I can't see a better way to do this than to power through Dan Grossman's three course sequence, which goes back to the drawing board and teaches Standard ML [0] to introduce modern programming language features such as scope, closures, types, pattern matching, modules, and so on. Then, he uses the concepts introduced in Standard ML as a springboard to introduce Scheme in the second course, and Ruby in the third course. And in the end, you will see how each of the three languages implement in different ways the same powerful techniques.

But with just that first Standard ML course, you can already branch out to more popular languages such as Scala [1], which gives you the closest thing I've seen to "Standard ML on the JVM". But Standard ML (or Ocaml, which is very close) might even be your preferred language for prototyping [2], or compiler writing [3].

P.S.: To make Coursera tolerable, I usually pull the entire course with this nice little script [4]. Works great with ranger and mplayer!

[0] https://www.coursera.org/learn/programming-languages

[1] https://www.coursera.org/specializations/scala

[2] https://sanderspies.github.io/slides/dawn-of-reason.pdf

[3] http://flint.cs.yale.edu/cs421/case-for-ml.html

[4] https://pypi.org/project/coursera-dl/

thank you!

Caveat emptor: Standard ML is not widely used in industry and does not have a large library ecosystem, so if you do recommend it to clients, make sure it's clear that they'd want to follow up with something like Scala or Ocaml, which have far more users/libraries. It's just that for really understanding functional programming, Standard ML is fantastically clear. (Although actually, that Scala coursera course I linked to above is by Martin Odersky, and is also pretty darn good, especially if you're already committed to the JVM.)

Others have mentioned Elixir, which would also be an interesting option to explore. The main difference being that with Elixir you're leveraging Erlang and BEAM (which gives you a fantastic platform for actors and lightweight threads), versus Java and the JVM in the case of Scala (which gives you access to all of Java).

> Uses script to copy programming course.

That's a little meta, don't you think?

Welcome to Lisp: https://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lisp.html :-)

I almost forgot to mention: Matt Might has an excellent blog post about what all of these "advanced" programming languages offer: http://matt.might.net/articles/best-programming-languages/

> if i was going to waste a bunch of time learning

Your problem is not what language to learn, your problem is that you think that learning is "wasting time."

> a functional language in 2019

Lisp is not a functional language, so your question does not even make sense.

If you actually want to help your clients, instead of selling them on bogus, inappropriate solutions (which, with your attitude and lack of knowledge, I guarantee is what you are doing to your clients today), you need to start actually learning the fundamentals of your field. If you think that learning is "wasting time," then you are not learning, you are, indeed, only "wasting time."

I am also a consultant, have worked with all the languages you listed, and I say the above to help you, and other people who consult, and me. Consulting is all about having a very solid knowledge base, continuous learning, and professionalism (which, BTW, includes basic writing skills, like capitalization). Attitudes like yours are why consulting engagements fail, and why consultants get a bad reputation. That only makes it harder for all of us to get work.

Erlang as the most pragmatic functional programming language.

Clojure as the most useful functional programming language.

Ditch both if/when you run into their limitations. You’ll then discover various degrees of FP in most languages.

I enjoyed Clojure and wrote a little production code using it but I'm finding F# much more fun and safer. F# is certainly far easier to refactor so that's another nice effect of having a static type system. Since .NET is so prevalent in business, it's easy to use almost anywhere.

I like a lot of F# but there's a lot of F# Person stigma to it in most shops that I've seen--condescending, shitty, and in many ways perceived, validly or invalidly, "different-to-be-different" (the Paket brouhaha comes to mind).

F# is a great language but I've found that it's usable when you can 1) convince C# people it's not that scary, and 2) convince them that you're not An F# Person.

Probably Erlang, but potentially Ocaml.

I'll probably catch some flack for this (from both sides): You can (and should) use Ocaml as a Lisp where you lose the easy macros but gain strict typing. It's brilliant. The only downside is emacs; it's the only sensible IDE.

Haskell (and friends) are fantastic, but in my experience you have to be reasonably smart and work full-time with it, since every medium sized project gets turned into its own DSL (more so than with other languages). Maybe it's not ideal for consulting.

I will always have a soft spot in my heart for Common Lisp, and Clozure Common Lisp (CCL) in particular. But all the cool kids seem to be using Clojure (with a J) nowadays.

Erlang has Elixir which is used throughout industry. Clojure is out there, too. I've also seen OCaml and Haskell here and there. F# is gaining ground.

+1 for F# (though I have to admit, Elixir seems much preferred as the functional weapon of choice in industry).

Amazing ML-derived language with all the benefits of the .NET ecosystem. Highly suggest everyone dip their toe in.

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