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  5. Common Lisp vs Haskell

Common Lisp vs Haskell

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Haskell
Haskell
Stacks1.4K
Followers1.2K
Votes527
Common Lisp
Common Lisp
Stacks268
Followers255
Votes145

Common Lisp vs Haskell: What are the differences?

## Key Differences between Common Lisp and Haskell

Common Lisp and Haskell are two popular programming languages with significant differences in their design and usage. Below are the key differences between Common Lisp and Haskell:

1. **Programming Paradigm**: Common Lisp is a multi-paradigm language that supports imperative, functional, and object-oriented programming styles. In contrast, Haskell is a purely functional language that does not allow side effects and emphasizes immutability.
   
2. **Type System**: Common Lisp has a dynamic type system where types are determined during runtime, allowing for flexibility but potentially leading to runtime errors. On the other hand, Haskell has a strong, static type system that ensures type safety at compile time and helps prevent errors. 

3. **Syntax**: Common Lisp has a more traditional syntax with parentheses for function calls and prefix notation for expressions. Haskell, on the other hand, uses a more mathematical syntax with curried functions, pattern matching, and higher-order functions.

4. **Lazy Evaluation**: Haskell employs lazy evaluation by default, postponing the computation of expressions until their results are actually needed. In contrast, Common Lisp uses strict evaluation, which means that arguments are evaluated before a function is called.

5. **Recursion vs. Loops**: Haskell encourages the use of recursion for repetitive tasks, leveraging the power of higher-order functions and pattern matching. Common Lisp provides loop constructs for iterative tasks and supports traditional looping mechanisms like do, do*, and dolist.

6. **Concurrency**: Haskell has built-in support for lightweight threads, software transactional memory (STM), and asynchronous programming, making it well-suited for concurrent and parallel programming. Common Lisp, while not lacking in concurrency tools, may require external libraries for advanced concurrency features.

In Summary, Common Lisp and Haskell differ in programming paradigm flexibility, type system strength, syntax style, evaluation strategy, looping approaches, and concurrency support.

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Advice on Haskell, Common Lisp

Timm
Timm

VP Of Engineering at Flexperto GmbH

Nov 10, 2020

Decided

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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Detailed Comparison

Haskell
Haskell
Common Lisp
Common Lisp

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.

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]

Statically typed; Purely functional; Type inference; Concurrent
-
Statistics
Stacks
1.4K
Stacks
268
Followers
1.2K
Followers
255
Votes
527
Votes
145
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 90
    Purely-functional programming
  • 66
    Statically typed
  • 59
    Type-safe
  • 39
    Open source
  • 38
    Great community
Cons
  • 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
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
    No hygienic macros
  • 2
    Small library ecosystem
  • 1
    Ultra-conservative community

What are some alternatives to Haskell, 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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