Crude_Dolorium comments on Programming Thread - Less Wrong
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If you're studying a language to learn from it, then the choice of language depends on what you want it to teach you.
Erlang and Haskell are similar languages, and mostly teach the same things: purely applicative (“functional”) programming and high-order (also called “functional”) programming. Erlang also teaches message-passing concurrency and live patching; Haskell also teaches laziness and modern static typing. I've found Haskell more educational than Erlang, possibly because more of the things it teaches were new to me, possibly because I've done more with it, and possibly because it has more to teach. (But it is more complex.) Haskell is also more popular and has more libraries. IIRC you're a mathematician or at least math-inclined, so you'd be comfortable with Haskell's very mathematical culture.
Of the “employable languages”:
Maybe not, but I still prefer its approach to inheritance and polymorphism than the approach some other languages take. For example, why Python is a great language overall, I dislike its entire OOP mechanism. IMO, Java is worth trying just because of that.
Yes, Java makes the distinction between: