I like Haskell, plain and simple. While Haskell is used in production software, it's not especially widely deployed from what I've seen. What is the most similar and still widely used language in regards to production projects so that I might have a snowball's chance of using something similarly awesome in industry? Also is the same language from the first part available on large numbers of platforms? If not, what is the best alternative that has wide platform deployment? I'd like a single language to put on my to-do list rather than a massive swarm or family. Hard evidence would be a plus.
What is the most compatible, widely used production language to export knowledge and skills gained from Haskell?
programming languages;functional programming;haskell
Haskell is most closely related to the ML family of languages. This includes things like OCaml, of course, but also F# on the .NET platform. These languages share with Haskell the foundation of the type system and how data is used--algebraic data types, pattern matching, type inference, etc. They can differ substantially from Haskell on other points, of course--most MLs are strict and impure, to start with, and the popularity of Haskell as a vehicle for research in type systems and language design means that most ML-style languages tend to have less powerful (but potentially easier to understand) type systems. It's probably safe to say that while you may miss some things about Haskell, particularly at first, most Haskell programmers would probably feel comfortably at home in an ML pretty quickly, at a basic getting-things-done level. If you want a language with the same overall structure as Haskell, an ML is your best bet.The functional side of Scala draws heavily from the ML tradition, as well, and also pulls in some advanced type system features familiar from Haskell, as well as a more standard OOP system integrated with the above. While OO in ML-style languages tends to be approached as more of a model OO with basic functional tools Scala lives and breathes Java-style OO. This has benefits for Java interop, as you might imagine, and presents more familiar working environment for OO programmers. However, coming from a Haskell background, you're more likely to be annoyed by ways that blending things together in Scala makes functional idioms clumsier, and find most Java APIs to be badly designed and needlessly difficult to use. So if you want something with a sophisticated type system that permits direct translations of many things in Haskell (with some extra syntactic overhead) and don't mind compromising on functional style, you might enjoy Scala.Finally, while it may seem odd to consider, Clojure actually has a lot of things in common with Haskell at a more philosophical level. Most of what you'll find in Clojure's approach to state and values vs. identities is very close in spirit to what Haskell formalizes through the type system. Correspondingly, Clojure emphasizes Java interop to a smaller degree and doesn't worry as much about dragging in OOP, so in some ways Clojure's approach to functional programming itself may be closest to what you're already familiar with. I think it's telling in this regard that, to the best of my knowledge, Clojure is the only language besides Haskell that has an implementation of STM that's simple, effective, and just works. On the other hand, Clojure comes from the Lisp tradition and thus lacks the static type system and emphasis on algebraic data types and pattern matching found in ML-influenced languages. And of course it's a Lisp, which is itself a negative to some people (though I really don't know why).Speaking for myself, with the disclaimer that my first experience with functional programming was in Scheme, I'd probably lean toward Clojure, with OCaml a likely second choice.