Ask HN: Haskell or Erlang?

[moe]

http://jjinux.blogspot.com/2009/02/haskell-or-erlang.html

[paulgb]

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.

[jrockway → paulgb]

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.)

[paulgb → jrockway]

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.

[biohacker42]

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.

[igorgue → biohacker42]

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

Erlang is trendy Haskell is not.

[biohacker42 → igorgue]

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

I heard about Haskell through academic connections.

[hairsupply → igorgue]

"Erlang is trendy Haskell is not."

What!? You must not visit reddit.

[andreyf]

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

What?

[critic → andreyf]

Kitten. I hate voice mail.

[critic]

Haskell for me.

[jrockway → critic]

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...

[critic → jrockway]

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.

[jrockway → critic]

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.