My AI class in college was taught in lisp. I found Lisp to be cool, but limited in terms of provided API's bindings, etc... is Haskell any better in that extent? Are there options for graphics libraries (i.e. if you were sick-and-twisted enough can you do OpenGL in Haskell?).

Anyhow, these kind of languages are what Computer Science is meant to be about. It's what draws me to Perl. Text processing isn't a huge chunk of the allure -- more so, it's the closures, anonymous subroutines, and other constructs which are more closely related to Lisp and other languages -- and harder to implement in most of the "business" languages of the day.

It appears Haskell is the way to go -- after all, one won't go blind from reading on too many parenthesis :)

As an aside, I'm a graduate of NC State University, where my AI professor lead a little project called 'Mimesis'...essentially there were writing an intelligent story generator in Lisp that drove a Quake engine which retold part of the story of Beowulf. Interesting idea -- but I knew one of the guys who worked on it -- and he said he had to roll his own XML parser in Lisp! Ouch! Things like that tend to keep me away from new languages, when the tools aren't there -- Perl is nice in this manner because there is a low barrier to entry in any sort of new task -- and a strong toolkit. But yes, it's too easy to think you are doing functional programming when you are not.