Alan Carter wrote:
We now need to be able to do parallel with ease. Functional programming just got really important.
While this is a reason to have a look at Haskell, I think it's not the best one. In fact, I think it's probably harmful to have parallelism as single goal for learning Haskell: the language is very different from imperative languages and if you "just want to do parallelism" but otherwise stick to what you know, you'll have a really hard time.
Eventually a 3 page introduction on the O'Reilly website together with a good document called "Haskell for C Programmers" got me to the point where I could access "Yet Another Haskell Tutorial", and I was away... for a bit.
IMHO, the easiest way to learn Haskell and to appreciate functional programming is to learn it from a textbook :) The online tutorials are nice but you'll have a much harder time with them. I'd recommend Hutton's "Programming in Haskell" for the basics and Bird's "Introduction to Functional Programming using Haskell" for the functional style. See also http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Books#Textbooks Of course, the textbooks (except "Real World Haskll" which is not done yet) most likely don't cover the System.IO stuff, but you've got the #haskell irc channel and the mailing list for that. So, the textbook remark is in anticipation of the questions that you are going to have :) (if you decide to pursue Haskell further, that is). Regards, apfelmus