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Elixir vs Haskell: What are the differences?
Developers describe Elixir as "Dynamic, functional language designed for building scalable and maintainable applications". 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. On the other hand, Haskell is detailed as "An advanced purely-functional programming language". .
Elixir and Haskell can be primarily classified as "Languages" tools.
"Concurrency" is the primary reason why developers consider Elixir over the competitors, whereas "Purely-functional programming " was stated as the key factor in picking Haskell.
Elixir is an open source tool with 15.6K GitHub stars and 2.22K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Elixir's open source repository on GitHub.
According to the StackShare community, Elixir has a broader approval, being mentioned in 177 company stacks & 190 developers stacks; compared to Haskell, which is listed in 33 company stacks and 47 developer stacks.
#rust #elixir So am creating a messenger with voice call capabilities app which the user signs up using phone number and so at first i wanted to use Actix so i learned Rust so i thought to myself because well its first i felt its a bit immature to use actix web even though some companies are using Rust but we cant really say the full potential of Rust in a full scale app for example in Discord both Elixir and Rust are used meaning there is equal need for them but for Elixir so many companies use it from Whatsapp, Wechat, etc and this means something for Rust is not ready to go full scale we cant assume all this possibilities when it come Rust. So i decided to go the Erlang way after alot of Thinking so Do you think i made the right decision?Am 19 year programmer so i assume am not experienced as you so your answer or comment would really valuable to me
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 Elixir
- Concurrency169
- Functional155
- Erlang vm130
- Great documentation110
- Great tooling103
- Immutable data structures84
- Open source79
- Pattern-matching76
- Easy to get started61
- Actor library58
- Functional with a neat syntax29
- Ruby inspired28
- Homoiconic24
- Erlang evolved23
- Beauty of Ruby, Speed of Erlang/C21
- Fault Tolerant17
- High Performance13
- Simple13
- Good lang10
- Stinkin' fast, no memory leaks, easy on the eyes9
- Doc as first class citizen9
- Pipe Operator9
- Resilient to failure7
- Fun to write6
- OTP5
- GenServer takes the guesswork out of background work5
- Fast, Concurrent with clean error messages4
- Idempotence4
- Not Swift4
- Pattern matching4
- Error isolation2
- Easy to use1
- Dynamic Typing1
Pros of Haskell
- Purely-functional programming86
- Statically typed65
- Type-safe58
- Great community38
- Open source38
- Composable29
- Built-in concurrency29
- Built-in parallelism28
- Referentially transparent22
- Generics19
- Intellectual satisfaction14
- Type inference13
- If it compiles, it's correct11
- Flexible7
- Monads7
- Great type system4
- Proposition testing with QuickCheck4
- One of the most powerful languages *(see blub paradox)*3
- Great maintainability of the code2
- Fun2
- Purely-functional Programming2
- Kind system2
- Reliable2
- Highly expressive, type-safe, fast development time2
- Type classes2
- Better type-safe than sorry2
- Pattern matching and completeness checking2
- Best in class thinking tool2
- Orthogonality0
- Predictable0
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Cons of Elixir
- Fewer jobs for Elixir experts11
- Smaller userbase than other mainstream languages7
- Elixir's dot notation less readable ("object": 1st arg)5
- Dynamic typing4
- Difficult to understand1
- Not a lot of learning books available1
Cons of Haskell
- Too much distraction in language extensions7
- Error messages can be very confusing7
- Libraries have poor documentation4
- No best practices3
- No good ABI3
- Sometimes performance is unpredictable2
- Poor packaging for apps written in it for Linux distros2
- Slow compilation1