Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
Groovy vs Haskell: What are the differences?
Groovy: A dynamic language for the Java platform. Groovy builds upon the strengths of Java but has additional power features inspired by languages like Python, Ruby and Smalltalk. It makes modern programming features available to Java developers with almost-zero learning curve; Haskell: An advanced purely-functional programming language. .
Groovy and Haskell belong to "Languages" category of the tech stack.
"Java platform" is the primary reason why developers consider Groovy over the competitors, whereas "Purely-functional programming " was stated as the key factor in picking Haskell.
Groovy is an open source tool with 1.49K GitHub stars and 414 GitHub forks. Here's a link to Groovy's open source repository on GitHub.
According to the StackShare community, Groovy has a broader approval, being mentioned in 79 company stacks & 73 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.