Ask HN: Haskell or Erlang?

Obviously both. But if you're looking to make an exclusive commitment for professional reasons, then I suspect Erlang is more industry and Haskell more academia.

Re: Ask HN: Haskell or Erlang?

#5

Post by igorgue » Wed, Mar 11, 2009, 7:52 PM UTC

biohacker42 wrote: post #4

Obviously both. But if you're looking to make an exclusive commitment for professional reasons, then I suspect Erlang is more industry and Haskell more academia.

I wonder if you had the same opinion about Erlang a year ago...

Erlang is trendy Haskell is not.

Re: Ask HN: Haskell or Erlang?

#6

Post by biohacker42 » Wed, Mar 11, 2009, 8:00 PM UTC

igorgue wrote: post #5

biohacker42 wrote: post #4

Obviously both. But if you're looking to make an exclusive commitment for professional reasons, then I suspect Erlang is more industry and Haskell more academia.

I wonder if you had the same opinion about Erlang a year ago... Erlang is trendy Haskell is not.

I was introduced to Erland several years ago because it was used in network switches.

I heard about Haskell through academic connections.

Re: Ask HN: Haskell or Erlang?

#7

Post by paulgb » Wed, Mar 11, 2009, 8:39 PM UTC

Haskell is more elegant, but erlang feels a bit more practical. In particular because of erlang's dynamic type system and symbols. If you are writing distributed software, erlang wins easily.

Re: Ask HN: Haskell or Erlang?

#8

Post by jrockway » Wed, Mar 11, 2009, 10:56 PM UTC

paulgb wrote: post #7

Haskell is more elegant, but erlang feels a bit more practical. In particular because of erlang's dynamic type system and symbols. If you are writing distributed software, erlang wins easily.

Haskell has (optional) dynamic typing now:

http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/base/D...

I have played with it a bit, and haven't had the occasion to use it for anything important. Static typing is good enough for me. (And this is coming from someone who mostly programs Perl.)

Re: Ask HN: Haskell or Erlang?

#9

Post by andreyf » Thu, Mar 12, 2009, 1:24 AM UTC

Root beer or apple juice? Baseball or candy? Kitten or voice mail?

What?

Re: Ask HN: Haskell or Erlang?

#10

Post by critic » Thu, Mar 12, 2009, 1:34 AM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #3

critic wrote: post #2

Haskell for me.

Agreed. It's more modern, more expressive, runs faster (and supports parallelism better, amusingly), and can talk to Erlang apps anyway. http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Applications_and_librarie...

I don't know about "modern" and "expressive", but it's definitely faster, and I really like the fact that the compiler catches 95% of the silly errors I'd make in a dynamically typed language.