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Asked: 2026-05-10T20:38:43+00:00

I have been researching and playing with functional programming lately, solely to broaden my

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I have been researching and playing with functional programming lately, solely to broaden my thinking about programming, because I find thinking ‘functionally’ difficult.

I have downloaded Glasgow Haskell and experimented with that.

What I am wondering is, what is the best platform for Windows to experiment with FP? I would prefer a JVM based approach, but another post on SO has indicated that a real FP language cannot be implemented on the JVM due to a lack of support for tail recursion. What say you?

EDIT: As I’ve said, I’ve experimented a fair bit with Haskell; on the advice of one of the answers I’ve been reviewing the Scala website. Looking over the Scala examples, the code seems more ‘familiar’ (my background is C and Java), but it seems decidedly more OO/procedural and less functional. A huge advantage of Scala would be that it gives me another language tool to use side by side with Java and could become another arrow in my current professional quiver, as opposed to solely being a learning exercise. When I get further into Scala, will the functional aspects become more predominant, or will I tend to end up just writing OO code with some functional influence? In other words, will Haskell challenge my preconceptions harder and faster than Scala?

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  1. If you really want to learn how to think in a functional way, Haskell is definitely the right choice. Just about every other language out there lets you slip into an imperative style much too easily. Haskell will force you into a functional mindset. I found this indispensible when learning. (You may certainly be more disciplined than I am, of course, but why push your luck?)

    When you’re satisfied with what you’ve learned from Haskell (which will be a lot!), you’re set to go out and evaluate more liberal functional languages like Clojure or Scala. Or you can stay with Haskell, whose library situation isn’t actually all that bad, either. At that point, it’s a question of circumstance and personal preference. But in order to make such a choice, having learned how to think in a “pure” functional way first is, I think, vital.

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