Haskell versus Clojure

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Haskell versus Clojure

I'm trying to decide which of these two I want to learn right now. I'll probably end up doing both but can't invest at the moment.

Clojure

Pros:

• The JVM is a fast, stable platform
• Ease of web app deployment (Heroku, etc)
• LISP, macros
• Good package manager
• Java libraries available

Cons:

• Ridiculously long startup time (useless for scripts)
• Lack of types
• Less popular on Github

Haskell

Pros:

• Type system
• Fast start up (+ runghci)
• "If it compiles, it does what you want."
• Longer history
• More popular on Github

Cons:

• Compiles to native code which makes it more difficult to deploy Haskell apps on things like Heroku
• Horrible package manager

Given ClojureScript I don't think it's accurate anymore to say that Clojure is not useful for scripting.

@swannodette Write in Clojure, compile to Javascript and run on node.js? I guess that would work, except you're losing the raw speed of Java. For simple things, this would work fine.

V8 is getting very fast. I recently ran the Alioth benchmark for spectral-norm single-threaded on the JVM. The same code written in ClojureScript running on V8 is within 1.5X :)