title: What language to learn after Haskell?
body: <p>As my first programming language, I decided to learn Haskell. I'm an analytic philosophy major, and Haskell allowed me to quickly and correctly create programs of interest, for instance, transducers for natural language parsing, theorem provers, and interpreters. Although I've only been programming for two and a half months, I found Haskell's semantics and syntax much easier to learn than more traditional imperative languages, and feel comfortable (now) with the majority of its constructs.</p>
  
  <p>Programming in Haskell is like sorcery, however, and I would like to broaden my knowledge of programming. I would like to choose a new programming language to learn, but I do not have enough time to pick up an arbitrary language, drop it, and repeat. So I thought I would pose the question here, along with several stipulations about the type of language I am looking for. Some are subjective, some are intended to ease the transition from Haskell.</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Strong type system. One of my favorite parts of programming in Haskell is writing type declarations. This helps structure my thoughts about individual functions and their relationship to the program as a whole. It also makes informally reasoning about the correctness of my program easier. I'm concerned with correctness, not efficiency.</li>
  <li>Emphasis on recursion rather than iteration. I use iterative constructs in Haskell, but implement them recursively. However, it is much easier to understand the structure of a recursive function than a complicated iterative procedure, especially when using combinators and higher-order functions like maps, folds and bind.</li>
  <li>Rewarding to learn. Haskell is a <em>rewarding</em> language to work in. It's a little like reading Kant. My experience several years ago with C, however, was not. I'm not looking for C. The language should enforce a conceptually interesting paradigm, which in my entirely subjective opinion, the C-likes do not.</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p><strong>Weighing the answers</strong>: These are just notes, of course. I'd just like to reply to everyone who gave well-formed responses. You have been very helpful.</p>
  
  <p>1) Several responses indicated that a strong, statically typed language emphasizing recursion means another functional language. While I want to continue working strongly with Haskell, camccann and larsmans correctly pointed out that another such language would "ease the transition too much." These comments have been very helpful, because I am not looking to write Haskell in Caml! Of the proof assistants, Coq and Agda both look interesting. In particular, Coq would provide a solid introduction to constructive logic and formal type theory. I've spent a little time with first-order predicate and modal logic (Mendellsohn, Enderton, some of Hinman), so I would probably have a lot of fun with Coq.</p>
  
  <p>2) Others heavily favored Lisp (Common Lisp, Scheme and Clojure). From what I gather, both Common Lisp and Scheme have excellent introductory material (<em>On Lisp</em> and <em>The Reasoned Schemer</em>, <em>SICP</em>). The material in <em>SICP</em> causes me to lean towards Scheme. In particular, Scheme through <em>SICP</em> would cover a different evaluation strategy, the implementation of laziness, and a chance to focus on topics like continuations, interpreters, symbolic computation, and so on. Finally, as others have pointed out, Lisp's treatment of code/data would be entirely new. Hence, I am leaning heavily towards option (2), a Lisp.</p>
  
  <p>3) Third, Prolog. Prolog has a wealth of interesting material, and its <em>primary</em> domain is exactly the one I'm interested in. It has a simple syntax and is easy to read. I can't comment more at the moment, but after reading an overview of Prolog and skimming some introductory material, it ranks with (2). And it seems like Prolog's backtracking is always being hacked into Haskell! </p>
  
  <p>4) Of the mainstream languages, Python looks the most interesting. Tim Yates makes the languages sound very appealing. Apparently, Python is often taught to first-year CS majors; so it's either conceptually rich or easy to learn. I'd have to do more research.</p>
  
  <p>Thank you all for your recommendations! It looks like a Lisp (Scheme, Clojure), Prolog, or a proof assistant like Coq or Agda are the main langauages being recommended.</p>