[hayleighdotdev]

> Honestly, and I realize that this might get me a bit of flack here and that’s obviously fine, but I find type systems start losing utility with distributed applications. Ultimately everything being sent over the wire is just bits.

Actually Gleam somewhat shares this view, it doesn't pretend that you can do typesafe distributed message passing (and it doesn't fall into the decades-running trap of trying to solve this). Distributed computing in Gleam would involve handling dynamic messages the same way handling any other response from outside the system is done.

This is a bit more boilerplate-y but imo it's preferable to the other two options of pretending its type safe or not existing.

[instig007]

> handling dynamic messages

the dynamic messages have to have static properties to be relevant for the receiving program, the properties are known upfront, and there's no "decades-running trap of trying to solve this".

[zbentley]

> there's no "decades-running trap of trying to solve this".

I’m not as certain. The fact that we’ve gone from ASN.1 to COBRA/SOAP to protobuf to Cap’n’web and all the million other items I didn’t list says something. The fact that, even given a very popular alternative in that list, or super tightly integrated RPC like sending terms between BEAMs, basic questions like “should optionality/absence be encoded differently than unset default values?” and “how should we encode forward compatibility?” have so may different and unsatisfactory answers says something.

Not as an appeal to authority or a blanket endorsement, but I think Fowler put it best: https://martinfowler.com/articles/distributed-objects-micros...

It absolutely is a decades old set of problems that have never been solved to the satisfaction of most users.

[tombert]

Interesting. Them being honest about this stuff is a point in their favor.

I might give it a look this weekend.