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  1. Stackups
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  5. Hack vs Haskell

Hack vs Haskell

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Haskell
Haskell
Stacks1.4K
Followers1.2K
Votes527
Hack
Hack
Stacks818
Followers169
Votes29
GitHub Stars18.5K
Forks3.1K

Hack vs Haskell: What are the differences?

1. **Type System**: Hack is a statically typed language, while Haskell is a statically typed functional programming language. Hack uses gradual typing, allowing developers to opt in or out of type annotations, whereas Haskell's type system is more strict and advanced, enabling more powerful type inference and guarantees. 2. **Execution Environment**: Hack is primarily used for web development, especially in the context of Facebook's HHVM (HipHop Virtual Machine), while Haskell is more commonly used in academia and for building high-assurance systems due to its emphasis on functional programming and mathematical foundations. 3. **Concurrency Model**: Hack supports asynchronous programming through async/await keywords, enabling easier handling of concurrent tasks, whereas Haskell has a strong focus on pure functions and immutability, making it well-suited for parallel and concurrent programming through tools like Software Transactional Memory. 4. **Community and Ecosystem**: The Hack language and ecosystem are heavily influenced by Facebook's needs and practices, making it more tailored to large-scale web applications and the challenges faced in that domain, while Haskell has a vibrant academic and open-source community that emphasizes correctness, expressiveness, and purity in functional programming. 5. **Tooling and Development Environment**: Hack has robust IDE support through tools like Hack Language Server, which provides features like code completion and type checking, whereas Haskell's development tools like GHC (Glasgow Haskell Compiler) and interactive environments like GHCi focus on expressiveness and correctness, often requiring a deeper understanding of functional programming concepts. 6. **Syntax and Paradigms**: Hack's syntax is influenced by PHP and C family languages, making it familiar to developers from those backgrounds, while Haskell's syntax is more unique and may require a shift in mindset towards functional programming paradigms such as pattern matching, currying, and monads.

In Summary, Hack and Haskell differ in their type systems, execution environments, concurrency models, communities and ecosystems, tooling and development environments, as well as syntax and paradigms.

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Advice on Haskell, Hack

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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Comments

Detailed Comparison

Haskell
Haskell
Hack
Hack

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.

Hack provides instantaneous type checking via a local server that watches the filesystem. It typically runs in less than 200 milliseconds, making it easy to integrate into your development workflow without introducing a noticeable delay.

Statically typed; Purely functional; Type inference; Concurrent
Fast Development; Type Checking; Built for HHVM; Type Annotations; Generics; Lambdas
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
18.5K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
3.1K
Stacks
1.4K
Stacks
818
Followers
1.2K
Followers
169
Votes
527
Votes
29
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
  • 6
    Open source
  • 6
    Interoperates seamlessly with php
  • 5
    Backed by facebook
  • 4
    HHVM
  • 2
    Great documentation
Integrations
No integrations available
HHVM (HipHop Virtual Machine)
HHVM (HipHop Virtual Machine)

What are some alternatives to Haskell, Hack?

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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