Some of this is obviously going to be the newness of Gleam, but I remember when Elixir was still brand new, and the OTP integration was one of the biggest selling points there, and a big part of their documentation and the ecosystem in general. Whereas with gleam, it almost seems like they're embarrassed of the runtime's distributed heritage? Whereas to me it seems like the OTP and the actors model in general would be the biggest selling point for a language like this.
Does anyone have any insight into why this is, or what concurrency practically feels like in gleam?
@external decorator: This escape hatch allows Gleam code to call functions defined in Erlang or Elixir modules. While it bypasses Gleam's type checks for the function call, it provides a powerful way to leverage the full capabilities of the existing OTP ecosystem.
I believe the biggest reason it's hard to replicate OTP fully and quickly is Gleam's type system (but I could be wrong).
I think Louis and the Gleam community are very serious about supporting OTP, but there are still open research questions around typing parts of OTP.
The parts of OTP that Gleam supports are still very useful, compatible with Erlang/Elixir, and very much used. And they have the benefit of being statically typed [1].
There's no embarrasement about Gleam's primary runtime being the BEAM, it's right there on the front page, above the fold! [2]
[1] https://github.com/bcpeinhardt/learn_otp_with_gleam [2] https://gleam.run/
My first impressions of Gleam
Seriously, I find the OCaml syntax way less obtuse than, for example, all the trait and macro idioms that I have to chop through with Rust. Sure, Rust has braces, but that doesn't make its syntax easy by any means.
Nevertheless, I am happy to see this Cambrian Explosion of programming languages. Eventually, we may get a good one.
Please stop.
I get the idea behind having a streamlined formatting style, but I’m really not a fan of denying users the flexibility to adjust it to their needs. Consistency across projects is nice, yet forcing everyone into a single indentation style feels unnecessarily rigid. A little configurability would go a long way :)
I'll accept that tabs unfortunately lost the tabs/spaces war (too complicated for many people I guess), but let's at least stick to 4 spaces please.
About the only argument I find remotely convincing from language devs (Nim is another similar lang) is that they don't want to maintain anything extra. Fair enough. The other arguments they roll out are always specious. The stuff in the issue above is comical: default GH tab width is 8, don't want Gleam to look weird to people looking at Gleam on GH, so force 2 spaces.. lol. Sometimes it seems like lang maintainers get a little too far up their own arses about this stuff. Your v0.x just-past-toy lang with a weak std lib and barely any ecosystem isn't turning off potential adopters because of how default indentation looks on one - arguably the worst - forge.. it's turning adopters away because of these silly hills you choose to die on. Nearly all mainstream langs handle spaces or tabs; forcing 2 spaces is just more "perceived strangeness", as a maintainer on that issue put it. It's your lang, do as you like with it, but if you want growth, don't be arbitrarily rigid.
This is indeed comical. At the same time, it's an odd choice for GH to display eight spaces for a tab nowadays. Perhaps a punishment that the source code uses tab characters at all?
I think Idea IDEs have that flexibility... Not sure.
I like the whimsical website. Never attributed it to anything, but “we’re all having fun here”.
OCaml is a simpler Haskell, but I don't think it has a C-like syntax. However, rescript[0], the JavaScript like syntax for OCaml based Hindley Milner typed language might actually fit well for small and personal projects.
[0] https://rescript-lang.org/docs/manual/v8.0.0/introduction
hoppp•4mo ago
I like rust but it takes too long to write. Go is usually my go to language because its simple I adore erlang and can write some elixir but I also dislike dynamic typing.
I have been looking at gleam for a while and I think now you inspired me to create a small project to learn more about it.
benzible•4mo ago
...and is gradually getting more gradually typed: https://elixirforum.com/t/elixir-v1-19-0-rc-0-released/71190...