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Arc

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Arc vs Haskell: What are the differences?

What is Arc? A dialect of the Lisp programming language developed by Paul Graham and Robert Morris. Arc is designed for exploratory programming: the kind where you decide what to write by writing it. A good medium for exploratory programming is one that makes programs brief and malleable, so that's what we've aimed for. This is a medium for sketching software.

What is Haskell? An advanced purely-functional programming language. .

Arc and Haskell can be categorized as "Languages" tools.

thoughtbot, DoxIQ, and Wagon are some of the popular companies that use Haskell, whereas Arc is used by Helpful, Cask, and Icalia Labs. Haskell has a broader approval, being mentioned in 33 company stacks & 47 developers stacks; compared to Arc, which is listed in 7 company stacks and 6 developer stacks.

Decisions about Arc and Haskell
Timm Stelzer
VP Of Engineering at Flexperto GmbH · | 18 upvotes · 651.5K views

We have a lot of experience in JavaScript, writing our services in NodeJS allows developers to transition to the back end without any friction, without having to learn a new language. There is also the option to write services in TypeScript, which adds an expressive type layer. The semi-shared ecosystem between front and back end is nice as well, though specifically NodeJS libraries sometimes suffer in quality, compared to other major languages.

As for why we didn't pick the other languages, most of it comes down to "personal preference" and historically grown code bases, but let's do some post-hoc deduction:

Go is a practical choice, reasonably easy to learn, but until we find performance issues with our NodeJS stack, there is simply no reason to switch. The benefits of using NodeJS so far outweigh those of picking Go. This might change in the future.

PHP is a language we're still using in big parts of our system, and are still sometimes writing new code in. Modern PHP has fixed some of its issues, and probably has the fastest development cycle time, but it suffers around modelling complex asynchronous tasks, and (on a personal note) lack of support for writing in a functional style.

We don't use Python, Elixir or Ruby, mostly because of personal preference and for historic reasons.

Rust, though I personally love and use it in my projects, would require us to specifically hire for that, as the learning curve is quite steep. Its web ecosystem is OK by now (see https://www.arewewebyet.org/), but in my opinion, it is still no where near that of the other web languages. In other words, we are not willing to pay the price for playing this innovation card.

Haskell, as with Rust, I personally adore, but is simply too esoteric for us. There are problem domains where it shines, ours is not one of them.

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Pros of Arc
Pros of Haskell
    Be the first to leave a pro
    • 90
      Purely-functional programming
    • 66
      Statically typed
    • 59
      Type-safe
    • 39
      Open source
    • 38
      Great community
    • 31
      Built-in concurrency
    • 30
      Built-in parallelism
    • 30
      Composable
    • 24
      Referentially transparent
    • 20
      Generics
    • 15
      Type inference
    • 15
      Intellectual satisfaction
    • 12
      If it compiles, it's correct
    • 8
      Flexible
    • 8
      Monads
    • 5
      Great type system
    • 4
      Proposition testing with QuickCheck
    • 4
      One of the most powerful languages *(see blub paradox)*
    • 4
      Purely-functional Programming
    • 3
      Highly expressive, type-safe, fast development time
    • 3
      Pattern matching and completeness checking
    • 3
      Great maintainability of the code
    • 3
      Fun
    • 3
      Reliable
    • 2
      Best in class thinking tool
    • 2
      Kind system
    • 2
      Better type-safe than sorry
    • 2
      Type classes
    • 1
      Predictable
    • 1
      Orthogonality

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    Cons of Arc
    Cons of Haskell
      Be the first to leave a con
      • 9
        Too much distraction in language extensions
      • 8
        Error messages can be very confusing
      • 5
        Libraries have poor documentation
      • 3
        No good ABI
      • 3
        No best practices
      • 2
        Poor packaging for apps written in it for Linux distros
      • 2
        Sometimes performance is unpredictable
      • 1
        Slow compilation
      • 1
        Monads are hard to understand

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      What is Arc?

      Arc is designed for exploratory programming: the kind where you decide what to write by writing it. A good medium for exploratory programming is one that makes programs brief and malleable, so that's what we've aimed for. This is a medium for sketching software.

      What is Haskell?

      It is a general purpose language that can be used in any domain and use case, it is ideally suited for proprietary business logic and data analysis, fast prototyping and enhancing existing software environments with correct code, performance and scalability.

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      What companies use Arc?
      What companies use Haskell?
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      What tools integrate with Arc?
      What tools integrate with Haskell?

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      What are some alternatives to Arc and Haskell?
      Akutan
      A distributed knowledge graph store. Knowledge graphs are suitable for modeling data that is highly interconnected by many types of relationships, like encyclopedic information about the world.
      JavaScript
      JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.
      Python
      Python is a general purpose programming language created by Guido Van Rossum. Python is most praised for its elegant syntax and readable code, if you are just beginning your programming career python suits you best.
      Node.js
      Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.
      HTML5
      HTML5 is a core technology markup language of the Internet used for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web. As of October 2014 this is the final and complete fifth revision of the HTML standard of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The previous version, HTML 4, was standardised in 1997.
      See all alternatives