Should I learn oCaml instead ? Looks appealing because companies like Facebook are using it create tools like Flow ( https://github.com/facebook/flow ).
My 2 cents: definitely _also_ learn OCaml down the line. But:
- my pet peeve with OCaml is the lack of a builtin type for Unicode strings (the only other language still commonly used with this shortcoming is PHP), and this could be an issue if you plan to write some web app code that needs to be internationalized
- OCaml is strict, Haskell is one of the very few languages that is non-strict: aside from the didactic purpose of exposing yoursefl to something different, that's a feature that can help reasoning about what your code is doing:
(then again, there're obviously downsides to non-strictness, and you might decide down the line that you prefer to write strict code in production... but it's good to know the alternatives)
Why do people choose programming languages based upon which big companies are using them? Learn a programming language because it is interesting, not because Facebook uses it.
Facebook is huge influencer in the open-source world. I don't see anything wrong with learning the tools/languages that it adopts. There are far smarter people working there.
In context of this question, It seems that learning both Haskell and oCaml is what people recommend.
If I'm learning a language for my own enjoyment, I'll learn whatever I want. If I'm learning a language to try to develop my career, I'll learn something that people want to pay for.
If you want to dive onto ocaml, I would highly recommend the "Real World Ocaml" book.
That said, I agree with berdario that you should learn both languages instead of only one of them. There is lots of terminology that is shared between FP languages too so it shouldn't be very hard either.
