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Erlang vs Haskell: What are the differences?
Developers describe Erlang as "A programming language used to build massively scalable soft real-time systems with requirements on high availability". 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. On the other hand, Haskell is detailed as "An advanced purely-functional programming language". .
Erlang and Haskell can be primarily classified as "Languages" tools.
"Real time, distributed applications" is the top reason why over 49 developers like Erlang, while over 72 developers mention "Purely-functional programming " as the leading cause for choosing Haskell.
Erlang is an open source tool with 7.74K GitHub stars and 2.1K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Erlang's open source repository on GitHub.
AdRoll, Grooveshark, and Heroku are some of the popular companies that use Erlang, whereas Haskell is used by thoughtbot, DoxIQ, and Wagon. Erlang has a broader approval, being mentioned in 70 company stacks & 47 developers stacks; compared to Haskell, which is listed in 33 company stacks and 47 developer stacks.
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.
Pros of Erlang
- Real time, distributed applications62
- Concurrency Support62
- Fault tolerance58
- Soft real-time36
- Open source32
- Message passing22
- Functional programming22
- Immutable data16
- Works as expected14
- Facebook chat uses it at backend6
- Practical5
- Knowledgeable community5
- Bullets included4
- WhatsApp uses it at backend1
Pros of Haskell
- Purely-functional programming90
- Statically typed66
- Type-safe59
- Open source39
- Great community38
- Built-in concurrency31
- Built-in parallelism30
- Composable30
- Referentially transparent24
- Generics20
- Type inference15
- Intellectual satisfaction15
- If it compiles, it's correct12
- Flexible8
- Monads8
- Great type system5
- Proposition testing with QuickCheck4
- One of the most powerful languages *(see blub paradox)*4
- Purely-functional Programming4
- Highly expressive, type-safe, fast development time3
- Pattern matching and completeness checking3
- Great maintainability of the code3
- Fun3
- Reliable3
- Best in class thinking tool2
- Kind system2
- Better type-safe than sorry2
- Type classes2
- Predictable1
- Orthogonality1
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Cons of Erlang
- Languange is not popular demand1
Cons of Haskell
- Too much distraction in language extensions9
- Error messages can be very confusing8
- Libraries have poor documentation5
- No good ABI3
- No best practices3
- Poor packaging for apps written in it for Linux distros2
- Sometimes performance is unpredictable2
- Slow compilation1
- Monads are hard to understand1