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kwkelly | 2 years ago

Keep an eye on gleam lang if you’re not already. It’s a language with an ML inspired type system (like rust) that compiles to erlang. It is likely too nascent to be used in production (in terms of tooling, ecosystem, stability, etc).

https://gleam.run

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pdimitar|2 years ago

I do already keep an eye on it and I like its syntax a lot. Problem is that the current commercial Elixir ecosystem is very strongly gravitating towards web and API development where several libraries reign supreme (Phoenix [web framework] and many of its dependents and derivatives, plus Absinthe [GraphQL] and Ecto [databases]). They also heavily rely on Elixir's macros so Gleam has quite a lot of work to do before it gains any tangible switching-over power.

To be honest... I am more likely to learn Golang more deeply (I know it quite well already but haven't, like, programmed in it in production for a long time, I am mostly using it for my own scripting and personal project needs) or even dive into OCaml now that it has a multithreaded runtime.

I do like how enthusiastically people make new languages but IMO most of them should be absorbed back into the hivemind at one point. This huge fragmentation does not help anything (except maybe teach you a technique or two which is of course very valuable by itself).

jacquesm|2 years ago

I think part of this is the ego component: it's much more fun to make a relatively big contribution to something new than it is to fix a small part of something much larger.