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Anyone can bake a cake, but while some chefs bake dry, uninspired bricks of dough, there are other chefs who make cakes we would die for. The ingredients may be the same, but the outcomes are so very different. This is also the case between average electronic products and world-class, market-changing products. One of the most recent technical sensations is the capacitive touch screen. But what makes some touch screen-based products amazing, while others get such poor reviews?

Since I wrote a bittorrent client in both Erlang and Haskell, etorrent and combinatorrent respectively, I decided to put up some bait. This might erupt in a language war and “My language is better than yours”, but I feel I am obligated to write something subjective. Here is to woes of programming in Haskell and Erlang.Neither Haskell, nor Erlang was a first language for me. I have programmed serious programs in C, Standard ML, Ocaml, Python, Java and Perl; tasted the cake of Go, Javascript, Scheme and Ruby; and has written substantial stuff in Coq and Twelf. I love static type systems, a bias that will rear its ugly head and breathe fire.I have written Haskell code seriously since 2005 and Erlang code seriously since 2007. I have programmed functionally since 1997 or so. My toilet reading currently is “Categories for the working mathematician” by Mac Lane. Ten years ago it was “ML for the working programmer” by Paulson.Enough about me.