Edit: On review, it seems the best description of Gleam is in the bio for the one of the presenters (which doesn't really say much about them). Apparently it's a programming language.
Maybe not every web page has to explain everything all the time?
I’ve read the entire front page. I don’t know more than that. A wonderful example of people who already know the answer writing the text. They really need a concise explanation. That said, they did very well in their explanation of benefits - the other part of a landing page - and I’d be keen to learn more.
From the conference page:
> the Gleam programming language, a friendly language for building type-safe systems that scale! It runs on the Erlang virtual machine, as well as on JavaScript runtimes.
And that sounds really intriguing. But nowhere does it explain why or how it is ‘friendly’. Erlang has a mystique and I suspect there’s a really solid niche here they’ve found.
Agree, the conference page doesn't explain Gleam at all. Perhaps they expect everyone interested in a Gleam conference to know what Gleam is. A reasonable expectation, I'd say.
Was super surprised to see this #1 on the front page just now. Really makes you wonder.
Which industry?
Either way, I'm not sure whether Gleam is used much by "the industry".
Gleam is interesting because it's the first statically typed language for Erlang VM, other languages for it can have gradual typing and type hints (TypeScript-style), but under the hood they are still dynamic.
The team behind it cares about adoption so they try to do many things around the language right: they have a compiler, a package manager, a code formatter, an LSP server. So, while the developer experience may seem somewhat rough you still get a feeling of maturity. Gleam doesn't feel like someone's experiment or a toy, but rather like a language that will be around and actively developed for decades.
eterm•5mo ago