Ask HN: Haskell or Erlang? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Haskell or Erlang?

jjinux.blogspot.com

87 pointsmoe13 comments

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.)

Thanks, I wasn't aware of that. I think baked-in dynamic typing is preferable, but I suppose there are cases where this could work just as well.

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.

"Erlang is trendy Haskell is not."

What!? You must not visit reddit.

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

What?

Kitten. I hate voice mail.

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.

I don't find Haskell to be less expressive than languages like Perl. I will admit that I haven't written enough Erlang to really get a feel for expressiveness.

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