Quick question. CL, Clojure, Erlang, Haskell. Which one to choose for Web dev | Hacker News Reader

Quick question. CL, Clojure, Erlang, Haskell. Which one to choose for Web dev

3 pointstweetur9 comments

Which functional programming language to choose for Web development?

I love Lisp, and find there is a lot to like about Clojure. But we're building a system with critical (life-or-death) high-reliability requirements, so we're going with Erlang for its proven robustness and scalability. Personally, I'm not thrilled with the Prolog-like language syntax, but there are alternatives in the making. Erlisp had promise, but now appears to be fallow, but Robert Virdig's Lisp Flavored Erlang (LFE) [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=286288] looks to be progressing well. We're planning on switching over when it achieves a bit more maturity. Lisp on the Erlang VM - best of all worlds!

The only knock I'd have against Haskell is, even though the Haskell proggers I've been fortunate to meet are wizards, all have already involved with cool projects, and are reluctant to jump ship.

I am using the erlang nitrogen framework and am overjoyed at how fun it is. Give it a try!

What made you choose erlang and nitrogen? Why not Haskell and HAPS or Erly for erlang

I was very much inspired with what Rusy K. had put together, and I feel it was a good choice now that I went with nitrogen. Haskell has turbinado, too :)

you should first chose the platform (asp.net, PHP, python...) and then decide which language to work with.

Uh... CL, Clojure (JDK), Haskell and Erlang are all different platforms, too.

Exactly. I am currently leaning towards erlang. But then, Clojure looks impressive too. And well I can't possibly deny the absolute awesomeness of CL. There are other in the hitlist too...SmallTalk, Scala etc etc. What do you guys use and why did you choose what you did?

I still prefer Python/Django, personally. Unless you need to do Comet you're just dealing with normal request/response cycles and I still think pre-fork single-threaded webservers work just fine for that purpose. Until I'm totally fluent in one of the others (and until their libraries catch up with Python) I don't think I could choose one and feel pragmatic.

For comet you always have Orbited. I am not fluent in any (Have written small programs in a few of them), but I want to develop in a functional language. The think I am most interested in a powerful language with a web framework/library which could take care of most of the mundane stuff related to web programming. Also features like ORM etc would be really helpful

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