> Is it worth my time to learn Clojure or Haskell, when I don't even know what I'll use it for?
I don't know if it's a binary decision between investing a lot of of time, or investing none. You could skim the reference manual, and if anything jumps out at you, you have a topic for future investigation, or a non-zero quantity of information to base your decision to "is it worth more time?" on.
If you mean on a very abstract level, the balance between learning what others are doing and producing your own stuff, you might enjoy Richard's Hamming essay "You and your Research", pg hosts a copy on his site: http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html
I don't know if it's a binary decision between investing a lot of of time, or investing none. You could skim the reference manual, and if anything jumps out at you, you have a topic for future investigation, or a non-zero quantity of information to base your decision to "is it worth more time?" on.
If you mean on a very abstract level, the balance between learning what others are doing and producing your own stuff, you might enjoy Richard's Hamming essay "You and your Research", pg hosts a copy on his site: http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html