LISP or Haskell [closed]

Question

LISP or Haskell, I need to learn functional programming, but I heard that lisp is very old, any advice between those two languages ?

Answer 1

Just to echo the others, I'd learn both Scheme (a more functional Lisp dialect) and Haskell. Scheme / Lisp have some useful tricks to teach you about 'code is data / data is code' and macros. Scheme encourages a good functional style and I would recommend the 'The Little Schemer' series of books to get you started on this. SICP is also a fantastic text http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html and possibly one of the best books ever written on programming. Scheme is more accessible as a first functional language.

Once you've got the hang of Scheme you'll probably find yourself becoming frustrated with the lack of libraries, lack of parallelism and the small, although excellent, community. This is where I was when I decided to learn Haskell. Haskell is very mature, very useful and very functional and it is quite a challenge to learn once you move off the basics and so having a grounding in another functional language will help enormously. You won't regret learning either (or both).