

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
Haskell has (optional) dynamic typing now:

[http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/base/D...](http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/base/Data-
Dynamic.html)

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

Erlang is trendy Haskell is not.

~~~
biohacker42
I was introduced to Erland several years ago because it was used in network
switches.

I heard about Haskell through academic connections.

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

What?

~~~
critic
Kitten. I hate voice mail.

------
critic
Haskell for me.

~~~
jrockway
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...](http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Applications_and_libraries/Interfacing_other_languages/Erlang)

~~~
critic
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
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.

