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  5. Clojure vs Common Lisp vs Haskell

Clojure vs Common Lisp vs Haskell

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Clojure
Clojure
Stacks1.9K
Followers1.4K
Votes1.1K
GitHub Stars10.7K
Forks1.5K
Haskell
Haskell
Stacks1.4K
Followers1.2K
Votes527
Common Lisp
Common Lisp
Stacks268
Followers255
Votes145

Clojure vs Common Lisp vs Haskell: What are the differences?

Introduction

Clojure, Common Lisp, and Haskell are three popular functional programming languages with distinctive features. To understand their differences, we will highlight key aspects that set them apart.

  1. Syntax: Clojure uses a Lisp syntax with a focus on simplicity and minimalism, leveraging the parentheses-heavy S-expression format. Common Lisp offers a more verbose syntax with a rich set of built-in constructs, making it suitable for a wide range of tasks. Haskell, on the other hand, uses a unique mix of functional and imperative styles, featuring distinctive type signatures and type inference capabilities.

  2. Concurrency: Clojure emphasizes immutable data structures and software transactional memory for managing concurrency. Common Lisp provides multiprocessing capabilities through its threads and processes model. Haskell incorporates lazy evaluation and pure functions to enhance concurrency handling, with features like Software Transactional Memory (STM) in its toolbox.

  3. Type System: Clojure is dynamically typed, allowing for rapid prototyping and flexibility in development. Common Lisp supports both strong and weak typing paradigms, providing developers with a choice based on project requirements. Haskell boasts a powerful static type system that ensures type safety at compile time, promoting robust and reliable code.

  4. Community and Ecosystem: The Clojure community is known for its emphasis on simplicity, immutability, and the pragmatic programming philosophy. Common Lisp boasts a long-standing and dedicated community that continues to maintain and expand libraries and tools. Haskell's community is renowned for its focus on purity, correctness, and mathematical rigor, supporting developers in creating high-performance and reliable software.

  5. Learning Curve: Clojure's minimalist syntax and functional programming concepts make it relatively accessible for newcomers, especially those familiar with Lisp-style languages. Common Lisp's rich feature set and syntactic flexibility can lead to a steeper learning curve for beginners. Haskell's strong emphasis on types and functional programming principles may pose a challenge for individuals transitioning from imperative languages.

  6. Use Cases: Clojure is well-suited for web development, data processing, and concurrent programming due to its emphasis on immutability and simplicity. Common Lisp shines in AI research, language design, and rapid prototyping, offering a mature ecosystem for various domains. Haskell excels in creating high-performance, reliable, and mathematically rigorous software, making it popular in industries such as finance, academia, and research.

In Summary, Clojure, Common Lisp, and Haskell differ in syntax, concurrency handling, type systems, community focus, learning curves, and preferred use cases, each offering distinct advantages for various programming tasks.

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Advice on Clojure, Haskell, Common Lisp

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.

682k views682k
Comments
Fronted
Fronted

Nov 23, 2020

Decided

We’re a new startup so we need to be able to deliver quick changes as we find our product market fit. We’ve also got to ensure that we’re moving money safely, and keeping perfect records. The technologies we’ve chosen mix mature but well maintained frameworks like Django, with modern web-first and api-first front ends like GraphQL, NextJS, and Chakra. We use a little Golang sparingly in our backend to ensure that when we interact with financial services, we do so with statically compiled, strongly typed, and strictly limited and reviewed code.

You can read all about it in our linked blog post.

720k views720k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Clojure
Clojure
Haskell
Haskell
Common Lisp
Common Lisp

Clojure is designed to be a general-purpose language, combining the approachability and interactive development of a scripting language with an efficient and robust infrastructure for multithreaded programming. Clojure is a compiled language - it compiles directly to JVM bytecode, yet remains completely dynamic. Clojure is a dialect of Lisp, and shares with Lisp the code-as-data philosophy and a powerful macro system.

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.

Lisp was originally created as a practical mathematical notation for computer programs, influenced by the notation of Alonzo Church's lambda calculus. It quickly became the favored programming language for artificial intelligence (AI) research. As one of the earliest programming languages, Lisp pioneered many ideas in computer science, including tree data structures, automatic storage management, dynamic typing, conditionals, higher-order functions, recursion, and the self-hosting compiler. [source: wikipedia]

-
Statically typed; Purely functional; Type inference; Concurrent
-
Statistics
GitHub Stars
10.7K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
1.5K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
1.9K
Stacks
1.4K
Stacks
268
Followers
1.4K
Followers
1.2K
Followers
255
Votes
1.1K
Votes
527
Votes
145
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 118
    It is a lisp
  • 101
    Concise syntax
  • 100
    Persistent data structures
  • 90
    jvm-based language
  • 89
    Concurrency
Cons
  • 11
    Cryptic stacktraces
  • 5
    Need to wrap basically every java lib
  • 4
    Toxic community
  • 3
    Slow application startup
  • 3
    Good code heavily relies on local conventions
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
  • 24
    Flexibility
  • 22
    High-performance
  • 17
    Comfortable: garbage collection, closures, macros, REPL
  • 13
    Stable
  • 12
    Lisp
Cons
  • 4
    Too many Parentheses
  • 3
    Standard did not evolve since 1994
  • 2
    No hygienic macros
  • 2
    Small library ecosystem
  • 1
    Ultra-conservative community
Integrations
Java
Java
No integrations availableNo integrations available

What are some alternatives to Clojure, Haskell, Common Lisp?

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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