Due to the 2000 character limit, I had to trim the above. Here's the excess for those interested.

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My experience with functional languages is very limited. My university required one course that delved into both functional (Scheme) and logic (Prolog) languages along with context-free grammars through BNF. Because of the broad range of material, I can safely say that I did not take away much from the course (aside from an awareness of the subjects).

I'm coming from an academic computer engineering background of C and Verilog (embedded system development and software/hardware codesign) as well as an academic computer science background of Java. In my industry work, I've learned some Python, Ruby (Sinatra/Rails), and Javascript (both client-side and server-side through NodeJS).

I'm leaning towards Haskell simply because XMonad was written in it, meaning that I will finally understand my window manager's configuration script. I've also considered Erlang because of how powerful I've heard it is with concurrency (and is one of the best for the actor model).