IoT systems are increasingly pervasive, and developing, maintaining and ensuring the reliability of the software is challenging. IoT software is conventionally structured in multiple distributed tiers, where tiers use different programming languages and components that must interoperate. One way to minimise this complexity is to use a single tierless language to specify the entire IoT system. Tierless IoT languages require extremely sophisticated implementations, and are new and rare.

A previous study compared two Clean-based tierless implementations of a smart campus IoT system (CRS and CWS) with two conventional tiered Python implementations (PRS and PWS). It showed that tierless languages dramatically reduce development effort.

This paper describes a new implementation of the smart campus system in the Elixir/Potato tierless language (ERS), and compares ERS with the other implementations to show the following. (1) We provide further evidence that using a tierless IoT language reduces development effort. (2) We provide the first ever comparative study of two fundamentally different tierless IoT languages, i.e. we compare Elixir/Potato with Clean/iTask(mTask) using the ERS and CRS/CWS case studies. (3) We provide the first ever analysis of the software engineering costs of providing failure management in a tierless IoT language.