Scheme vs Haskell for an Introduction to Functional Programming?

Posted by haziz on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by haziz
Published on 2011-04-18T22:52:00Z Indexed on 2012/08/29 3:50 UTC
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I am comfortable with programming in C and C#, and will explore C++ in the future. I may be interested in exploring functional programming as a different programming paradigm. I am doing this for fun, my job does not involve computer programming, and am somewhat inspired by the use of functional programming, taught fairly early, in computer science courses in college. Lambda calculus is certainly beyond my mathematical abilities, but I think I can handle functional programming.

Which of Haskell or Scheme would serve as a good intro to functional programming? I use emacs as my text editor and would like to be able to configure it more easily in the future which would entail learning Emacs Lisp. My understanding, however, is that Emacs Lisp is fairly different from Scheme and is also more procedural as opposed to functional.

I would likely be using "The Little Schemer" book, which I have already bought, if I pursue Scheme (seems to me a little weird from my limited leafing through it). Or would use the "Learn You a Haskell for Great Good" if I pursue Haskell. I would also watch the Intro to Haskell videos by Dr Erik Meijer on Channel 9.

Any suggestions, feedback or input appreciated.

Thanks.

P.S. BTW I also have access to F# since I have Visual Studio 2010 which I use for C# development, but I don't think that should be my main criteria for selecting a language.

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