[pivotal]

I spent some time working through various Haskell books with varying success, then decided to do a code challenge (adventofcode.com) using Elm. I didn't finish, but after writing Elm for many days on end, suddenly Haskell clicked a lot more. The Elm compiler is far more friendly than Haskell's and will walk you through a lot of rookie mistakes and oversights.

I find Elm exciting, and with the prevalence of React/Redux these days, a lot of front end developers would be wise to familiarize themselves with the origin of many of the concepts borrowed from Elm.

[nickpeterson]

I bought a few Haskell books but could never really grok it. In the last couple years I started learning f# and have found it's an incredible "intro to Haskell" language. I opened one of my Haskell books the other day and realized I understood everything much more quickly.

[ode]

The same is true of OCaml.

[insulanian]

F# is a beautiful, pragmatic, functional programming language. It's a shame some people dismiss it due its Microsoft origins.

[nickpeterson]

Yeah, F# feels like Don Syme looked at ocaml and haskell and applied a bit of yagni and tossed in some other useful conventions (I'm sure many others were involved as well).

It drives me crazy that Microsoft doesn't push it harder from an investment perspective. They don't even write books about it :)

[comp1927]

There are books out there. For new language adoption, F# do have new features like Type Providers. However, it's not the best language in X for X in ['data science', 'distributed system'] etc.

[nickpeterson]

Sorry, my language was vague. There are many F# books, but I find it telling that Microsoft Press doesn't really write books about it. Look at C#, VB.Net, Office, SQL Server, Sharepoint, etc. Almost everything has a new book (or 10) every new edition. F#? Nothing.