Lambda the Ultimate

As part of a move, I recently took a truckload of books to the local used book purveyor, and now have about $350 in credit to use either there or at their sister store, which sells new books (hurrah). I figure this is free license to get a couple of FP-oriented (or other-interesting-software-oriented) volumes.

But I know there have been a few recent books coming out since I last looked at FP books several years ago. I'm looking closely at the new Erlang book by the Pragmatic Programmer guys (not out yet, but soon), and I already have SICP. Most people don't seem to go for Practical OCaml. Is there a "standout best" Haskell book, or any particular book on FP that's just a can't-miss?

I'm afraid I'm doing it mostly for the knowledge, not that I have an application in mind; I'm going into computational physics, and as much as I'd love to see FP languages make headway there, particularly with recent things like Nvidia's CUDA and other such things, it still seems to be primarily the domain of C and Fortran. I guess my point being that I probably don't need deep theory stuff--mostly expand-your-mind stuff.

Any standout recommendations?

This is a bit premature, the conference papers aren't available on the Clean iTasks website yet, but

• Tasks are statically typed.
• Tasks are fully dynamic: what a task is doing may depend on the work produced.
• One can define user defined tasks.
• Tasks can be defined recursively.
• Thanks to polymorphism and overloading user defined re-useable tasks can be defined.
• Tasks are fully compositional: any combination of tasks made with the combinators can be re-used again as a task.
• Tasks can be higher order: not only values can flow from one task to another, but it can be tasks!

ppt presentation
demos

I am doing C# 2.0. Recently I'v struggled hardly with ORM ideas. Before that I was struggling with a add-in architecture. In last 2 years I'v tried to extend my views by digging into Ruby, Haskell, Erlang, ... and even JavaScript more deeply! In many many situations after a hard battle I came across with a "set of elements" idea. Imagine you'v had trapped in a dessert; you will only concentrate what is essential! I felt that and always some lights came to me! Not in form of an angle! In form of a list! Please tell me what's wrong here! I can even think more than this! Were we walking backward in last 20 years to reach lisp??!!