Question

We are going to write a concurrent program using Clojure, which is going to extract keywords from a huge amount of incoming mail which will be cross-checked with a database.

One of my teammates has suggested to use Erlang to write this program.

Here I want to note something that I am new to functional programming so I am in a little doubt whether clojure is a good choice for writing this program, or Erlang is more suitable.

Answer 1

The two languages and runtimes take different approaches to concurrency:

• Erlang structures programs as many lightweight processes communicating between one another. In this case, you will probably have a master process sending jobs and data to many workers and more processes to handle the resulting data.

• Clojure favors a design where several threads share data and state using common data structures. It sounds particularly suitable for cases where many threads access the same data (read-only) and share little mutable state.

You need to analyze your application to determine which model suits you best. This may also depend on the external tools you use — for example, the ability of the database to handle concurrent requests.

Another practical consideration is that clojure runs on the JVM where many open source libraries are available.