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I've been coding for a few years now, nothing too complicated. C++ is what I know best. I recently stumbled into Paul Graham's site, coding horror, and now here.
What do I learn to "enlighten myself with the ways" of functional programming? Haskell, Scheme or CLisp?
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Let's take a look at some reasons why you might want to consider learning Functional Programming. One of the many aspects that makes FP so appealing is that code creation is simplified. The code tends to be more concise and more predictable. With simpler, cleaner code, it's also easier to test and to maintain.
Elixir: Elixir is the most popular programming language in the world. It is a functional, general-purpose, and concurrent programming language that runs on the BEAM virtual machine. It is popular for its suitability to build low-latency, fault-tolerant, and distributed applications.
The biggest plus of learning a functional language before learning an OOP lang is that your programming skills get developed first and then you can easily grasp the OOP concepts.
There is no single reason why learning Functional Programming is difficult, but here are a few of the biggies (your mileage may vary). For people like me, i.e. someone who has been successfully programming for a long time in Imperative Languages, it's especially difficult because you have to unlearn many things.
If you're interested in functional programming, Haskell is the only purely functional language on that list. Common Lisp is a weakly functional mixed-paradigm language, and Scheme is more strongly functional but still not pure. Lisps are interesting for other reasons, but Haskell is pretty much the state of the art for functional programming.
Incidentally, the reason I encourage more strongly functional languages like Haskell is because a large part of "learning functional programming" is learning how to think of your program in a different way. If your language makes it feel natural to write imperatively, it's too easy to fall into that way of thinking and never realize there's a different way to do it.
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Of the three, I'd say Scheme is the simplest overall, if that's your main concern. SICP uses Scheme, and is itself a great resource for learning to program the functional way.
However, Common Lisp has many advanced features that make it quite expressive, such as powerful error handling (more powerful than exceptions), multimethods and support for aspect oriented programming.
You might start with one but, in the end, you should study many languages.
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