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  5. Common Lisp vs Erlang

Common Lisp vs Erlang

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Erlang
Erlang
Stacks1.4K
Followers749
Votes345
GitHub Stars11.9K
Forks3.0K
Common Lisp
Common Lisp
Stacks268
Followers255
Votes145

Common Lisp vs Erlang: What are the differences?

Common Lisp and Erlang are two popular programming languages with distinct features and characteristics. In this Markdown code, we will highlight the key differences between Common Lisp and Erlang in a concise manner.

1. Data Types Common Lisp supports a wide range of data types, including numbers, characters, strings, lists, arrays, structures, and classes. On the other hand, Erlang has a relatively limited set of data types, including integers, floats, atoms, tuples, lists, and binary data.

2. Concurrency Model Common Lisp primarily relies on threads and locks to achieve concurrency, which can sometimes lead to complexity and potential pitfalls such as race conditions. In contrast, Erlang embraces lightweight processes (actors) and message passing as the fundamental units of concurrency, providing built-in mechanisms for fault-tolerance and distribution.

3. Pattern Matching Erlang has powerful support for pattern matching, allowing developers to easily extract and manipulate data based on specific patterns. Common Lisp also supports pattern matching, but it is typically achieved through libraries or frameworks rather than being a built-in language feature.

4. Error Handling In Common Lisp, error handling is typically done using condition handling, where exceptions can be caught and handled at various levels of the call stack. Erlang, however, has a unique "let it crash" philosophy, where error handling is achieved through process isolation and supervision trees, allowing errors to be isolated and handled at a higher level.

5. Libraries and Ecosystem Common Lisp has a rich collection of libraries and a mature ecosystem, offering a wide range of tools, frameworks, and extensions for various domains and use cases. In comparison, Erlang's library ecosystem is more focused on concurrent and distributed programming, with libraries like OTP (Open Telecom Platform) being particularly strong in that area.

6. Tooling and Development Environment Common Lisp has a variety of well-established development environments, such as Emacs with SLIME (Superior Lisp Interaction Mode), which provide sophisticated features like code navigation, debugging, and integration with other tools. On the other hand, while Erlang also has integrated development environments like ErlIDE and Erlang-mode for Emacs, its tooling and IDE support might not be as mature or extensive as Common Lisp.

In Summary, Common Lisp and Erlang differ in their approach to data types, concurrency model, pattern matching, error handling, library ecosystem, and tooling/development environment.

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Detailed Comparison

Erlang
Erlang
Common Lisp
Common Lisp

Some of Erlang's uses are in telecoms, banking, e-commerce, computer telephony and instant messaging. Erlang's runtime system has built-in support for concurrency, distribution and fault tolerance. OTP is set of Erlang libraries and design principles providing middle-ware to develop these systems.

Lisp was originally created as a practical mathematical notation for computer programs, influenced by the notation of Alonzo Church's lambda calculus. It quickly became the favored programming language for artificial intelligence (AI) research. As one of the earliest programming languages, Lisp pioneered many ideas in computer science, including tree data structures, automatic storage management, dynamic typing, conditionals, higher-order functions, recursion, and the self-hosting compiler. [source: wikipedia]

Statistics
GitHub Stars
11.9K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
3.0K
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
1.4K
Stacks
268
Followers
749
Followers
255
Votes
345
Votes
145
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 62
    Real time, distributed applications
  • 62
    Concurrency Support
  • 58
    Fault tolerance
  • 36
    Soft real-time
  • 32
    Open source
Cons
  • 1
    Languange is not popular demand
Pros
  • 24
    Flexibility
  • 22
    High-performance
  • 17
    Comfortable: garbage collection, closures, macros, REPL
  • 13
    Stable
  • 12
    Lisp
Cons
  • 4
    Too many Parentheses
  • 3
    Standard did not evolve since 1994
  • 2
    Small library ecosystem
  • 2
    No hygienic macros
  • 1
    Ultra-conservative community

What are some alternatives to Erlang, Common Lisp?

JavaScript

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

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.

PHP

PHP

Fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world.

Ruby

Ruby

Ruby is a language of careful balance. Its creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming.

Java

Java

Java is a programming language and computing platform first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. There are lots of applications and websites that will not work unless you have Java installed, and more are created every day. Java is fast, secure, and reliable. From laptops to datacenters, game consoles to scientific supercomputers, cell phones to the Internet, Java is everywhere!

Golang

Golang

Go is expressive, concise, clean, and efficient. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel type system enables flexible and modular program construction. Go compiles quickly to machine code yet has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. It's a fast, statically typed, compiled language that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language.

HTML5

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.

C#

C#

C# (pronounced "See Sharp") is a simple, modern, object-oriented, and type-safe programming language. C# has its roots in the C family of languages and will be immediately familiar to C, C++, Java, and JavaScript programmers.

Scala

Scala

Scala is an acronym for “Scalable Language”. This means that Scala grows with you. You can play with it by typing one-line expressions and observing the results. But you can also rely on it for large mission critical systems, as many companies, including Twitter, LinkedIn, or Intel do. To some, Scala feels like a scripting language. Its syntax is concise and low ceremony; its types get out of the way because the compiler can infer them.

Elixir

Elixir

Elixir leverages the Erlang VM, known for running low-latency, distributed and fault-tolerant systems, while also being successfully used in web development and the embedded software domain.

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