>>12
Haskell is Ruby for functional programming. You can take that any way you want.
Lua is very easy to pick up, and writes a bit like a more-friendly Python (less irritating OO crap) with built-in tail call optimization. It's C interface is a lot nicer, too. For Q&D programs you write for yourself, it can't be beat. Everything is an associative array (table) in Lua, which may be weird at first but accomplishes just about everything you want to do anyway, and metatables give a lot of the benefits of OO without a lot of the overhead.