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bnchrchyesterday at 5:46 PM5 repliesview on HN

Gleam is a beautiful language, and what I wish Elixir would become (re:typing).

For those that don't know its also built upon OTP, the erlang vm that makes concurrency and queues a trivial problem in my opinion.

Absolutely wonderful ecosystem.

I've been wanting to make Gleam my primary language, but I fear LLMs have frozen programming language advancement and adoption for anything past 2021.

But I am hopeful that Gleam has slid just under the closing door and LLMs will get up to speed on it fast.


Replies

Uehrekayesterday at 7:20 PM

> I fear LLMs have frozen programming language advancement and adoption for anything past 2021.

Why would that be the case? Many models have knowledge cutoffs in this calendar year. Furthermore I’ve found that LLMs are generally pretty good at picking up new (or just obscure) languages as long as you have a few examples. As wide and varied as programming languages are, syntactically and ideologically they can only be so different.

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sbuttgereityesterday at 6:39 PM

> For those that don't know its also built upon OTP, the erlang vm

This isn't correct. It can compile to run on the BEAM: that is the Erlang VM. OTP isn't the Erlang VM; rather, "OTP is set of Erlang libraries and design principles providing middle-ware to develop [concurrent/distributed/fault tolerant] systems."

Gleam itself provides what I believe is a substantial subset of OTP support via a library: https://github.com/gleam-lang/otp

Importantly: "Gleam has its own version of OTP which is type safe, but has a smaller feature set. [vs. Elixir, another BEAM language with OTP support]"

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market_hackertoday at 4:37 AM

i just implemented a project in elixir with LLM support and would never have considered that before. (i had never used elixir before) - So who knows maybe it will help adoption?

agosyesterday at 6:52 PM

the Erlang vm is called BEAM, not OTP. sadly, Gleam's implementation of OTP is not at the same level as Elixir's or Erlang.

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innocentoldguytoday at 1:07 AM

I don’t mean to minimize the huge effort by the Gleam team; however, Elixir cannot become Gleam without breaking OTP/BEAM in the same ways Gleam does. As it stands now, Elixir is the superior language between the two, if using the full Erlang VM is your goal.

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