The best-maintained, all-purpose, language-specific bioinformatics libraries are supported by the Open Bioinformatics Foundation: BioPerl, Biopython, BioJava, BioRuby, and BioLib (C++). These libraries are so convenient it's often easier to just write a script in one of those languages even if you'd prefer a different language otherwise.
As Andrew pointed out, you can use BioJava with from a JVM-based functional language like Scala or Clojure.
BioLib is newer than the others, but it's meant to work well with SWIG so any other language can link it. Haskell has a good FFI, so you could try using it with Biolib the NCBI toolkit library -- those are probably maintained better than BioHaskell.