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Comment by nodivbyzero | Hacker News Reader

Is Clojure better than Erlang?

I use them both. They are very different beasts. I wouldn't say one is better than the other. They have different trade offs.

In Clojure I miss the preemptive VM support for the Erlang "processes", the pattern matching and the elegance of the pid mailboxes.

In Erlang I miss the fantastic built in data structures, the platform reach (targeting the browser for example), the syntax (refactoring clojure is a dream), macros, the REPL, the tooling, the time constructs (refs, agents, atoms) and a bunch off more esoteric stuff. (I don't miss core.async cause Erlangs processes are much better).

I tend to use Clojure by default and Erlang when the problem particularly suits it.

As an aside, you can get pattern matching in clojure as a library[0], though I'm not familiar with erlang so I can't say if clojure's implementation is a complete match in terms of functionality.

[0] https://github.com/clojure/core.match

Elixir has brought some interesting dynamics into the mix. Although the ErlangVM's time handling is a bit rudimentary to me. What are these refs/agents/atoms you mention?

Depends on your definition of better. It runs on the JVM, so you have easy access to the whole ecosystem of libraries. For me, that's always a big plus compared to non-JVM languages, but if you don't use that the case gets less clear.

Started doing some erlang work, I'm very impressed in the overall design of the thing. I'd say erlang is very well suited for heavy,low-latency networking because of the design of the VM and the characteristics of the language, whereas clojure is a bit up the stack. Anyway if you prefere parenthesis you got Lisp flavoured erlang: http://lfe.io

The problem with Erlang is that it's veeeery slow, so you'll need to write the computation-heavy stuff in C.

I am new to Erlang. I assume that you mean writing a linked-in driver or NIFs. Unless you need very low and precisely controlled latency for your computation-heavy code, too, why not write it, e.g., in Python with NumPy and talk to the Python process over a port?

You could. Or you could just run on the JVM. Either way, there are some tradeoffs to make.

There's a port of Erlang that runs on the JVM [1]. If you've got a lot of code in Erlang it could be beneficial. The language would the same, and you can choose VMs suited for a specific tasks. Or I'd like trying to use Elixir and Julia, probably over 0MQ or similar.

1: https://github.com/trifork/erjang

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