Ask HN: Relative Pro/Con of These Functional Languages

2 points·qrco··3 comments

I'm trying to get a relative assessment of both the functional and practical* nature for the following languages:

- Erlang/Elixir

- F#

- Scala

- Clojure

- Haskell

- Elm

Are there others you'd like to mention?

I don't expect a singular "best" list, more a "best for". The context would be for a general distributed tech stack.

* "practical" means actual use regardless of functional capacity.

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A big "best for" criteria difference across your list is the question of broader code ecosystem: F# works well with other CLR code (such as existing C# libraries and applications); Clojure works well with other JVM code (such as existing Java libraries and applications); Elm works well with other JS/ES code.

If you already have investments in one ecosystem or the other (whether in employee skills or in existing, possibly "legacy" applications), that should narrow a choice fairly easily. Similarly if you might expect investments into an ecosystem could give you market leverage (things like "we want our code to be usable/scriptable/API-able by other companies that only know C#/Java/JS").

That's great to know and is along the lines of what I was hoping to learn. Thanks!

Only one of those was purpose-built for distributed systems/application programming. The language, the runtime, and the standard library all designed together, in parallel to service the needs of writing, testing, deploying and debugging distributed systems/application software.

For all the rest, that ethos/use-case is a bolt-on set of libraries or frameworks.

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