We're in the process of choosing a primary language for our backend systems at a new venture. A few we're considering: Haskell, Clojure, OCaml, Elixir, F#, Scala.
What's a reasonably productive choice for a new startup? What would you choose if you determined a functional language mapped well to the objectives you were trying to accomplish?
Right now for the frontend we selected Elm.
Now for backend I've been playing with
Elixir and Haskell
Elixir has the nice syntax of ruby with all the performance of Erlang. So that makes it a good candidate however what I don't like about it is: - it isn't strongly typed... and once you get used to types and all the bugs it catches you can't go back. - although variables are inmutable they behave as if they look a lot like mutable state and I don't want to lose that warranty either.
Then there is Haskell. Haskell is great until you need to do IO. And 80% of the webdevelopment is IO... either to the database, to an API or HTML... and all the current options seem overly complicated. I tried haskell with Servant which gives strong type to an API but the syntax is ugly Used Scotty (like ruby's Sinatra) but then the URLs are strings and when definning APIs you can't specify the types. Then I tried with Yesod I don't like such heavy frameworks and try to avoid Template Hasell...
So I continue to search....
Next in my list consider is FSharp and OCaml
Agreed on the typing, however.
Have you guys looked into Dialyzer?
Dialyzer is a static analysis tool for Erlang and other languages that compile to BEAM bytecode for the Erlang VM. It can analyze the BEAM files and provide warnings about problems in your code including type mismatches and other issues that are commonly detected by static language compilers. The analysis can be improved by inclusion of type hints (called specs) but it can be useful even without those. For more information I highly recommend the Success Typings paper that describes the theory behind the tool.
That's from the Dialyxir (for using Dialyzer w/Elixir) github page: https://github.com/jeremyjh/dialyxir
More: http://learnyousomeerlang.com/dialyzer
(Perhaps this should be read first: http://learnyousomeerlang.com/types-or-lack-thereof )
And this is the Success Types paper behind it (mentioned in the excerpt above):
https://www.it.uu.se/research/group/hipe/papers/succ_types.p...
To that post I would add that the OCaml -> JavaScript compiler, BuckleScript, now gives you access to the entire npm package repository, so it's not such a big risk any more as it was for them at the time.