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  5. Elm vs Erlang

Elm vs Erlang

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Erlang
Erlang
Stacks1.4K
Followers749
Votes345
GitHub Stars11.9K
Forks3.0K
Elm
Elm
Stacks758
Followers744
Votes319

Elm vs Erlang: What are the differences?

  1. Syntax: Elm has a more straightforward and simple syntax compared to Erlang, making it easier for beginners to pick up and learn quickly. Erlang, on the other hand, has a syntax that is more specific to functional programming languages, which might be challenging for newcomers.

  2. Platform: Elm is mainly used for front-end web development, focusing on creating user interfaces, while Erlang is typically used for building distributed systems and telecommunications infrastructure due to its fault-tolerant and scalable nature.

  3. Concurrency Model: Erlang is known for its lightweight concurrency model through processes and actors, making it easier to handle massive amounts of concurrent users or tasks efficiently. Elm, on the other hand, focuses more on immutable data structures and functional purity rather than explicit concurrency primitives.

  4. Type System: Elm has a strong static type system with type inference, ensuring fewer runtime errors and more predictable behavior in a codebase. In contrast, Erlang has a dynamic type system, which can lead to errors only being discovered during runtime execution.

  5. Community Support: Elm has a smaller but dedicated community that focuses on front-end development and maintains a curated list of libraries and tools. On the other hand, Erlang has a larger and more established community due to its longevity and usage in critical systems, providing a wide range of libraries and resources for various applications.

  6. Tooling: Elm has a powerful compiler and tooling ecosystem that enforces best practices and helps developers catch errors early in the development process. Erlang, while also having robust tooling, is more focused on system-level tools for building and monitoring distributed applications.

In Summary, Elm and Erlang differ in syntax simplicity, platform focus, concurrency model, type system, community support, and tooling ecosystem.

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Detailed Comparison

Erlang
Erlang
Elm
Elm

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.

Writing HTML apps is super easy with elm-lang/html. Not only does it render extremely fast, it also quietly guides you towards well-architected code.

-
No Runtime Exceptions; Fearless refactoring; Understand anyone's code; Fast and friendly feedback; Enforced Semantic Versioning; Small Assets
Statistics
GitHub Stars
11.9K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
3.0K
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
1.4K
Stacks
758
Followers
749
Followers
744
Votes
345
Votes
319
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 62
    Concurrency Support
  • 62
    Real time, distributed applications
  • 58
    Fault tolerance
  • 36
    Soft real-time
  • 32
    Open source
Cons
  • 1
    Languange is not popular demand
Pros
  • 45
    Code stays clean
  • 44
    Great type system
  • 40
    No Runtime Exceptions
  • 33
    Fun
  • 28
    Easy to understand
Cons
  • 3
    No typeclasses -> repitition (i.e. map has 130versions)
  • 2
    JS interop can not be async
  • 2
    JS interoperability a bit more involved
  • 1
    More code is required
  • 1
    Backwards compability breaks between releases

What are some alternatives to Erlang, Elm?

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.

Meteor

Meteor

A Meteor application is a mix of JavaScript that runs inside a client web browser, JavaScript that runs on the Meteor server inside a Node.js container, and all the supporting HTML fragments, CSS rules, and static assets.

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.

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