Christopher Smith wrote:
http://wagerlabs.com/2006/01/01/haskell-vs-erlang-reloaded
I remember reading this when it first came out. I think in a lot of ways
this guy wasn't comfortable with the Haskell paradigm. He seemed to be
wanting a dynamically typed language, and as long as you are looking at
the problem that way, a statically typed language is gonna hurt you bad.
He also had problems with memory consumption which tends to go better
with a) newer versions of GHC and b) programming Haskell "the Haskell
Way". I have observed on many occasions that when things weren't
efficient in Haskell it was because I was formulating my code the wrong
way. Same point goes for his problems with serialization.
No huge argument. I will point out, though, that he had two of the
biggest Haskell guns helping him, and they really couldn't crack the nut.
In addition, "you have to think the Haskell way to be efficient" smacks
of "you have to think the XXX way to be efficient". Generally, I find
that argument means "We're not very flexible. We fit a certain class of
problems and ignore the rest". That's not necessarily a bad thing, but
people should be aware of it.
I'm going to express an opinion here: good languages should unfold
themselves with use. You should be able to get your job done, albeit
inefficiently, with a reasonable investment of time. As you do more,
you should get better and more efficient.
This may be some of the gripe a lot of programmers have with "pure"
languages like Haskell. You have to move a long way up the learning
curve to do anything useful. In Haskell, you must understand Monads
before being able to handle I/O. That's a slog even for functional
programmers with some decent experience.
My point is that there is a fair bit of impedance mismatch between
Erlang's runtime model and the JVM's, particularly when it comes to
concurrency. Believe it or not the JVM is even more troublesome than the
standard POSIX runtime.
I agree. That's why I want it *even more*. If you can't port that
runtime, then you're eventually going to stumble over that impedance
mismatch somewhere else.
-a
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