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by lmm 4243 days ago
> If languages like Haskell and Erlang gave a competitive advantage, wouldn't we see companies which used them succeeding over those that don't?

We are. WhatsApp generated a flurry of interest around Erlang. Heroku uses it. I'm sure there are more examples.

Google is at this point already a large corporation and probably already in decline (IMO). The tools they use are optimized for interchangeability of mediocre programmers, not for high productivity from a small team. Go is a perfectly good Java 1.4.

(There's Docker using Go, but I think their whole approach is a bad idea).
1 comments
jshen 4242 days ago
You are seeing companies that use those languages suceeding at a higher rate than those that don't? I bet I can find 10 succeeding that use ruby or node for everyone that uses Erlang.

We could also look at the open source world. For every riak there are 10 java sucesses of a similar kind.

We'd need to do some real statistics but my bet is that we see no benefit from those languages in terms of success of the business.

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lmm 4242 days ago
> I bet I can find 10 succeeding that use ruby or node for everyone that uses Erlang.

But that's not the question, is it? There are a lot of companies succeeding with ruby or node, but also a lot of companies failing with them. I'll bet the strike rate is better for Erlang companies.

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jshen 4242 days ago
Il bet that the choice of language has no impact on success.
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codygman 4242 days ago
What about whitespace? Do you think choosing it or brainfuck has an impact on success?
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jshen 4242 days ago
Not relevant. I'm sure there are bad choices, but the difference between Go and Haskell is probably negligible or in Go's favor.
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lmm 4242 days ago
So you think Go is a better language because companies that use Go are more likely to be successful because... Go is a better language? That's just circular reasoning. Do you have any numbers or experience here?

(In my limited experience I've seen a 100% success rate for companies that use Haskell and a 0% success rate for companies that use Go, though as you can imagine I don't have a statistically valid sample size)

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codygman 4241 days ago
As someone with experience in both languages I disagree. Try parsing json in both languages and you'll see a difference. Composing functions that use channels simply isn't possible in Go (please prove me wrong).

Go gives you kind of safe concurrency, Haskell gives you actual safe concurrency.

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