3 ms·
I'm sure Gleam fits a niche—maybe something similar to Elm?—but I can't justify using it over Elixir because I'm not willing to trade things like 1. Full acces
by innocentoldguy 2y ago
I'm sure Gleam fits a niche—maybe something similar to Elm?—but I can't justify using it over Elixir because I'm not willing to trade things like
1. Full access to the BEAM.
2. Full access to OTP behaviours and other features.
3. Lisp-style macros.
4. Late-bound function calls.
5. Dynamic message passing.
6. Native supervision trees.
7. Internationalization.
for static types. Doing so feels like trading my car's engine for a suction cup phone holder.
(EDIT: Fixed formatting.)
- cardanome 2y agoYeah, especially as Elixir is gradually gaining gradual typing support so you will get some level of static type safety anyway.
- juped 2y agoElixir is all in on being an OTP language, and is a friend, not competitor, to Erlang (go ahead, call one from the other freely, the only friction is that module name atoms look a little weird in the other language). Gleam is not entirely foreign but it sets itself further apart; it's all in on cloning Rust. (Elixir's set-theoretic type system is _not_ a constructor-soup ML deal, by the way. The people who talk about "static type systems" now are people who caught the ML bug and think "is like ML" equals "types", and they will not find it satisfying, just like they don't find existing Dialyzer types satisfying. So that's the niche for Gleam.)