I like Gleam, but I am somewhat annoyed by the fact, that I don't have the full functional freedom in calling recursive (inner) functions wherever I want. I don't know, why new functional languages do not get this right all the way, straight from some rnrs document or implementation. Another thing is the separate operators like .> and .< and so on. What I liked were of course pipes and pattern matching.

To me it felt less elegant than Scheme (GNU Guile) which I usually use (with nice parallelism if I want to, pipelines, and also pattern matching), and, aside from syntax, conceptually perhaps less elegant than Erlang. On the other hand it has static typing.

I also tried OCaml this year, but there are issues in the ecosystem making a truly reproducible environment/setup, because opam doesn't produce proper lock files (only version numbers) and it seemed silly to not be able to even include another file, without reaching for dune, or having to specify every single file/module on command line for the OCaml compiler. So I was left unsatisfied, even though the language is elegant and I like its ML-ness. I wish there was a large ecosystem around SML, but oh well ...

Might be I should take another look at Erlang soon, or just finally get started with Haskell. Erlang using rebar3 should have proper lock files, has pattern matching, and if I remember correctly no such limitations for calling functions recursively. No longer sure how or whether Erlang did inner functions though.