Racket vs Erlang

Realm of Racket teaches the big-bang approach for managing world state. It does so by walking the reader through the development of small games. There are few guidebooks that are as useful and entertaining.

Racket is based on Scheme (LISP Family) and is very similar to Clojure. So there are a ton of (). The reason it is easier to learn is that it is not trying to be "Pure" if there is even such a thing in terms of Functional Programming. The great thing about Racket is it has everything included. You get DrRacket for developing programs. You want to add a picture to your software you can insert pictures. If you want to add libraries just open the package manager. The Syntax is an opinion but it really does feel easier to see what is happening since everything is in brackets)
Racket is a really a Programming Language for making Programming Languages. So there are smaller syntax Racket called Student Racket which makes things easier to pick up.

Includes several free online books and great documentation.

Racket has an active community of users/developers that makes it easy to get help when needed.

Although syntax is different from that of mainstream languages, S-expressions are a perfect match to functional programming.

Racket makes it inconvenient to pursue imperative habits while encouraging functional programming by Lisps's syntax. For example, the syntax for defining a function is almost the exact same as defining a variable. In addition, Racket has a strong set of higher-order functions built in to the language.

Racket is famously embedded in the game engine underlying Naughty Dog's Uncharted and The Last of Us games, because it proved to be so easy to embed.

Erlang has strong roots with the telecom industry in which concurrent processes are normal. It's designed to be concurrent, to be used for distributed computing and to be scalable.

Fault tolerance means that a system has the property to continue operating even though one or more components have failed.

For Erlang systems, this means that the system is kept running even if for example a user has to drop a phone call rather than forcing everyone else to do so.

In order to achieve this, Erlang's VM gives you:

• Knowledge of when a process died and why that happened
• The ability to force processes to die together if they depend on each other and if one of them has a fault.
• A logger that logs every uncaught exception
• Nodes that can be monitored so that you find out when they go down
• The ability to restart failed processes (or groups of them)

In a real-time system it may not be possible to stop the system in order to implement code upgrades. For these cases Erlang gives you dynamic code upgrade support for free when using OTP. The mechanism is very easy to understand and works as follows:

1. Start the app
2. Edit the code
3. Recompile

That's all that is needed, the app updates with the new code while it's still running and tests are run automatically.

Erlang is made to be parallel and distributed. Because it's very easy to write code that uses multiple processor cores, it's also very easy to write applications that span multiple servers.

Erlang has been used in production for more than 20 years now. During that time it has proven itself over and over again that works great in both small startups and large-scale enterprise systems.

Erlang has been used extensively by Ericsson themselves. For example, the AXD301 ATM, which is one of Ericsson's flagships is probably the largest Erlang project ever with more than 1.1 million lines of Erlang code.

Erlang's processes have very little overhead (about 500 bytes per process). This means that a huge amount of processes can be created, even on older machines.

Erlang's processes run in a complete independent way from the OS (they aren't managed by the OS scheduler neither). This means that programs written in Erlang will run exactly the same way regardless of the operating system or platform.