Apple's Swift, with its roots in Objective C's Lisp heritage, is helping take functional programming out of the classroom and into the real world.

Scala is an easy transition for those familiar with Java and object-oriented programming. But if you want to learn the basics of functional programming, Scheme is hands-down the best.

Scheme, ML, Haskell, Clojure, F#, Common Lisp, and Scala (in no particular order) are all functional languages and support higher-order functions, lambda functions, and closures.

See recursion. FP Languages LISP was the first functional programming language, followed by Erlang, Scheme, Haskell, OCaml, Scala, Clojure, F# and others.

C remains the language of choice for most embedded developers with C++ close behind. Java is in the mix along with other programming languages but functional programming languages show up in very ...

But this isn’t an outright endorsement of learning two-plus languages–it matters which ones you pick. “Learning similar languages might not progress your thinking much,” says Pattis.