Programming language syntax has come such a long way.
It's not just a matter of taste; we used to deal with language particulars which were objectively hard for humans to adhere to, for no good reason. No one seriously advocated for semi-colons as a matter of aesthetic preference.
Gleam just looks like a modern language. It looks like it was made for humans to deal with, given what we now know about the human visual system, memory, habit formation, etc.
Does anyone have a good comparison of using Gleam vs Elixir in 2024 (i.e. the pros and cons of each)? I've only used Elixir, but definitely curious to tinker with Gleam...
They're both functional and on the same runtime, but they're very different languages. I think the best way to understand the different experiences they offer is to try them both.
I love Gleam's syntax and types but one thing keeping me for jumping in is that it has some limitations regarding it's OTP integration. Which, to me, is one of the most exciting parts of Elixir or Erlang.
Congrats on the release, it like every bit of it !
I hope Gleam will find more sponsors for Louis and the core contributors, especially one from a stable company !
On this side, have you thought about publishing paid educational content to both pay the bill and still contribute to Gleam’s growth ? I don’t know for others but I would love to pay for something like Luca Palmieri’s book Zero To Production in Rust but in Gleam !
The BEAM ecosystem seems very impressive for backend style work, but both Erlang and Elixir's syntax are kind of a put off. Gleam I've found to be quite readable and very pleasant to look at - plus it gets all the OTP/BEAM benefits for super scaling.
I wrote a small telnet parser with it to run in the browser. This type system and its pattern match is very well suited for that sort of thing.
I only needed only a subset of the spec, but with a negotiated subprotocol. I couldn't find a client library that worked for this in the browser, they all depended on node.
Normally I would write this in rescript, which has the same type system and ML heritage, and which I still love. But my sense is that rescript is floundering and gleam is growing in popularity & capability, so I'm eyeing gleam for an eventual replacement.
It's not just a matter of taste; we used to deal with language particulars which were objectively hard for humans to adhere to, for no good reason. No one seriously advocated for semi-colons as a matter of aesthetic preference.
Gleam just looks like a modern language. It looks like it was made for humans to deal with, given what we now know about the human visual system, memory, habit formation, etc.