So, if I need to write *now* a network application, should I *invest* in Haskell, or should I just *use* Erlang?
You're in Haskell-Cafe... the bias is there already for Haskell. Personally, I don't have experience doing network applications in Haskell, but I've got about a year's worth or more using Erlang, so for me it's a pretty easy choice, and I wouldn't pick Haskell today. (hearing boos in the background as I type this...) However, I would invest in learning to use Haskell, because my experience with Erlang has been that it really is pretty great, and has lovely features, like the ability to shell into a running process and poke around if something seems not quite right, or even to ssh into it if you run the right services. Plus there's tons of stuff pre-written for network applications that just comes with the Erlang distribution, meaning there's nothing else to install.... but even after all of that, I miss the type safety of Haskell, as it's really painful to do this in erlang function(T1, T2, T3) when is_list(T1) and is_integer(T2) and is_integer(T3) -> ....function body Even if you have a list, you don't know "what of" so you never really get the guarantees that you get when a Haskell program successfully compiles... That peace of mind is not easily won in Erlang, except by lots of testing. Dave
As a counter example: I really don't like SQL. However I have to use it, if I don't want to re-implement a database by myself. The same can be said with Fortran.
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Regards Manlio _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe