alt Hacker NewsIt’s really good. But it needs generics. This is a huge downside. It’s a typed and clean functional programming language but it arbitrarily followed golangs early philosophy of no generics. Ironically golang is one of the most hated languages among many fp advocates.
By the developers own action of adding generics ultimately the golang team admits they were wrong or that generics are better. If gleam gets popular I think much of the same will occur.
There’s simply too much repeated code without generics. I tried writing a parser combinator in gleam and it wasn’t pretty.
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Go touted it's lack of features as simplicity. And it is: on the language writing side. Go is an incomplete language masquerading as a simple one.
Perhaps this is a silly question but how do you do functional with no generics? Arent they pretty much required for map/reduce/filter?
I saw your other comment that you meant interface. But an example of a language that went without a feature people thought the language desperately needed was Go with generics. They only added them more than ten years later, when they figured out the best way to implement them.
It might be the same with gleam, with first version in 2019 and 1.0 in 2024. The language authors might think they are either uneeded and lead to anti patterns, or are waiting to see the best way to implement them.
Why does it need generics? There's a great blog post about how you can replace a lot of trait behaviour with just functions. Maybe something like that can be done for generics
Gleam has always had generics! There’s no Gleam version without them