A brutal truth of programming today is that serious tools for educated & dedicated people don't have large communities. Of course, this is predictable with the law of large numbers[1], which implies that as size grows, the system shifts towards mediocrity.
But since Haskell, Prolog, Common Lisp, etc, are designed for people who take their tools seriously and perform serious inquiries, they are generally incapable of casual pickup and use by the novice.
I've spent years in Common Lisp and can't recommend it enough for someone interested in a designed dynamic language (as opposed to Perl or Python). I imagine modern Smalltalk might have the same feel.
But since Haskell, Prolog, Common Lisp, etc, are designed for people who take their tools seriously and perform serious inquiries, they are generally incapable of casual pickup and use by the novice.
I've spent years in Common Lisp and can't recommend it enough for someone interested in a designed dynamic language (as opposed to Perl or Python). I imagine modern Smalltalk might have the same feel.
[1] http://mathworld.wolfram.com/WeakLawofLargeNumbers.html