Haskell vs Java vs Python

Overview

Python

Stacks262.9K

Followers205.4K

Votes6.9K

GitHub Stars69.7K

Forks33.3K

Java

Stacks148.0K

Followers105.5K

Votes3.7K

Haskell

Stacks1.4K

Followers1.2K

Votes527

Haskell vs Java vs Python: What are the differences?

Syntax: Haskell uses a functional programming paradigm with a clear, concise syntax that emphasizes immutability and pure functions, while Java and Python both have an object-oriented paradigm with more verbose syntax, especially Java with its extensive boilerplate code for class definitions.
Type System: Haskell has a strong type system with type inference, static typing, and type classes, ensuring code correctness at compile time, whereas Python is dynamically typed, allowing for flexibility but potentially leading to runtime errors, and Java has a more cumbersome type system requiring explicit type declarations.
Concurrency: Haskell offers powerful abstractions for dealing with concurrency, using lightweight threads and software transactional memory, while Java provides built-in support for multithreading but is prone to issues like race conditions, and Python has the global interpreter lock (GIL) limiting true parallelism.
Garbage Collection: Java and Python both use garbage collection to manage memory automatically, which can lead to overheads and performance issues, while Haskell employs lazy evaluation and immutable data structures to minimize memory usage and improve performance without a garbage collector.
Error Handling: Haskell encourages the use of monads for handling errors in a type-safe manner, ensuring that side effects are managed properly, while Java and Python rely more on try-catch blocks, leading to potential issues with exceptions being thrown at runtime without proper handling.
Community and Ecosystem: Haskell has a smaller but dedicated community focused on academic and functional programming, with robust libraries like Lens and Parsec, Java has a vast ecosystem backed by Oracle and numerous third-party libraries, and Python has a large and diverse community with an extensive standard library and popular frameworks like Django and Flask.

In Summary, Haskell stands out with its functional and type-safe approach, while Java and Python provide a more versatile object-oriented paradigm with different strengths and weaknesses in terms of syntax, type system, concurrency, memory management, error handling, and community support.

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Advice on Python, Java, Haskell

Thomas

Talent Co-Ordinator at Tessian

Mar 11, 2020

Decided

In December we successfully flipped around half a billion monthly API requests from our Ruby on Rails application to some new Python 3 applications. Our Head of Engineering has written a great article as to why we decided to transition from Ruby on Rails to Python 3! Read more about it in the link below.

263k views263k

Comments

Nick

Building cool things on the internet 🛠️ at Stream

Sep 5, 2019

Review

I work at Stream and I'm immensely proud of what our team is working on here at the company. Most recently, we announced our Android SDK accompanied by an extensive tutorial for Java and Kotlin. The tutorial covers just about everything you need to know when it comes to using our Android SDK for Stream Chat. The Android SDK touches many features offered by Stream Chat – more specifically, typing status, read state, file uploads, threads, reactions, editing messages, and commands. Head over to https://getstream.io/tutorials/android-chat/ and give it a whirl!

176k views176k

Comments

Ido

Mar 6, 2020

Decided

When developing a new blockchain, we as a team chose Go lang over Java and other candidates, due to Go being (a) natively suited to concurrency - there are primitives in the language itself (goroutines, channels) that really help with reasoning about concurrency (b) super fast - build time, running, testing are all much faster that Java, this gives a far superior developer experience (c) shorter and stricter than Java - code is much shorter (less verbose), and there is usually one good way to do things, and even the code formatter that is bundled with Go is very opinionated - over a short time this makes reading other people's code far smoother than having to deal with different styles.

You should be aware that Go presently (v1.13) lacks Generics.

267k views267k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Python	Java	Haskell
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.	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!	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.
-	-	Statically typed; Purely functional; Type inference; Concurrent
Statistics
GitHub Stars 69.7K	GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 33.3K	GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 262.9K	Stacks 148.0K	Stacks 1.4K
Followers 205.4K	Followers 105.5K	Followers 1.2K
Votes 6.9K	Votes 3.7K	Votes 527
Pros & Cons
Pros 1186 Great libraries 966 Readable code 848 Beautiful code 789 Rapid development 692 Large community Cons 53 Still divided between python 2 and python 3 28 Performance impact 26 Poor syntax for anonymous functions 22 GIL 20 Package management is a mess	Pros 608 Great libraries 446 Widely used 401 Excellent tooling 396 Huge amount of documentation available 334 Large pool of developers available Cons 33 Verbosity 27 NullpointerException 17 Nightmare to Write 16 Overcomplexity is praised in community culture 12 Boiler plate code	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
Integrations
Django	Spring	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Python, Java, Haskell?

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.

PHP

Fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world.

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.

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 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# (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 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 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.

Swift

Writing code is interactive and fun, the syntax is concise yet expressive, and apps run lightning-fast. Swift is ready for your next iOS and OS X project — or for addition into your current app — because Swift code works side-by-side with Objective-C.

Rust

Rust is a systems programming language that combines strong compile-time correctness guarantees with fast performance. It improves upon the ideas of other systems languages like C++ by providing guaranteed memory safety (no crashes, no data races) and complete control over the lifecycle of memory.

Related Comparisons

Haskell vs Java vs Python: What are the differences?

Syntax: Haskell uses a functional programming paradigm with a clear, concise syntax that emphasizes immutability and pure functions, while Java and Python both have an object-oriented paradigm with more verbose syntax, especially Java with its extensive boilerplate code for class definitions.
Type System: Haskell has a strong type system with type inference, static typing, and type classes, ensuring code correctness at compile time, whereas Python is dynamically typed, allowing for flexibility but potentially leading to runtime errors, and Java has a more cumbersome type system requiring explicit type declarations.
Concurrency: Haskell offers powerful abstractions for dealing with concurrency, using lightweight threads and software transactional memory, while Java provides built-in support for multithreading but is prone to issues like race conditions, and Python has the global interpreter lock (GIL) limiting true parallelism.
Garbage Collection: Java and Python both use garbage collection to manage memory automatically, which can lead to overheads and performance issues, while Haskell employs lazy evaluation and immutable data structures to minimize memory usage and improve performance without a garbage collector.
Error Handling: Haskell encourages the use of monads for handling errors in a type-safe manner, ensuring that side effects are managed properly, while Java and Python rely more on try-catch blocks, leading to potential issues with exceptions being thrown at runtime without proper handling.
Community and Ecosystem: Haskell has a smaller but dedicated community focused on academic and functional programming, with robust libraries like Lens and Parsec, Java has a vast ecosystem backed by Oracle and numerous third-party libraries, and Python has a large and diverse community with an extensive standard library and popular frameworks like Django and Flask.

Haskell vs Java vs Python

Overview