alt Hacker NewsDo you like Rust or do you like Erlang? Writing Gleam is like writing Rust, writing Elixir is like writing Erlang.
I don't know the current state of Gleam OTP, but last I checked it wasn't great.
If you don't care about either of those things and only about types, use Gleam. But then why not just use Rust?
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Your last sentence is basically where I'm at, writing my backends in Rust these days. I'm interested in the BEAM promise of letting things crash but not sure how good that is in Gleam due to its OTP still being somewhat immature as the devs are rewriting GenServer as a typed library.
> writing Elixir is like writing Erlang
I wrote both Elixir and Erlang code. Erlang is just useless to me as a programming language; it has many great ideas though. I love the idea of being able to think in terms of immortal, re-usable, safe objects (Erlang does not call these objects, but to me this is OOP by Alan Kay's definition. I don't use e. g. the java definition for OOP.)
Elixir built on that and made Erlang code optional, meaning people could write more pleasent code. And here it succeeded. I am not sure why Elixir succumbed to type madness now, but the comment that "writing Elixir is like writing Erlang", is just simply not true.
Elixir is significantly better than Erlang with regard to writing code. José Valim got inspiration for Elixir from ruby, to some extent.
Hi, I'm the lead maintainer of Gleam.
> I don't know the current state of Gleam OTP, but last I checked it wasn't great.
Gleam uses regular OTP, it doesn't have a distinct OTP framework separate from other BEAM languages.