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I tried Gleam for Advent of Code

blog.tymscar.com

41–50 of 223 posts

Re: I tried Gleam for Advent of Code

#41
post #14

Gleam is a great language. It didn't click for me when I was trying it out, but I'm glad to see more people enjoying it. And I wonder if Gleam + Lustre could become the new Elm.

I recently used Gleam + Lustre for a small app that I normally would have built with Elm + PostgREST. It went very well, and I'm now planning to use it for a larger rewrite (of a rails app).

Re: I tried Gleam for Advent of Code

#42
post #14

Gleam is a great language. It didn't click for me when I was trying it out, but I'm glad to see more people enjoying it. And I wonder if Gleam + Lustre could become the new Elm.

As a mostly back end dev Elm looked really nice but all the conflict with the creator and then the lack of compiler releases made me shy away a bit. I have bumped into "the Elm architecture" in other projects though and it was nice.

> all the conflict with the creator

Just so no one misunderstands this. The creator (Evan) didn't get into, or start, any drama himself that I ever noticed. I'd argue he's a very chill and nice dude.

I've been on the edges of the community for probably a decade now (lurker), and all of the drama came from other people who simply didn't like the BDFL and slow releases strategy.

Re: I tried Gleam for Advent of Code

#44

It’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 t…

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.

That’s the worse is better philosophy which maybe doesn’t matter as much anymore especially with AI

Re: I tried Gleam for Advent of Code

#45

One thing im wondering with the LLM age we seem to be entering: is there value in picking up a language like this if theres not going to be a corpus of training data for an LLM to learn from? Id like to invest the time to learn Gleam, but I treat a language as a tool, or a means to an end. I feel like more and more I'm reaching for the tool to get the job done most easily, which are languages that LLMs seem to gel wi…

claude is really good at elixir. IME, It's really really good with a few "unofficial" tweaks to the language/frameworks, but this could be my bias. the LLM cutoff was a fear of mine, but i think it's actually the opposite. we know that as few as 250 documents can "poison" an LLM, i suspect that (for now) a small language with very higg quality examples can "poison" LLMs for the better.

Re: I tried Gleam for Advent of Code

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel that was more true 1-2 years ago. These days I find Claude Code write almost as good (or as bad depending on your perspective) Elixir code as JavaScript code and there must be less Elixir code in the training data.

I personally find it much more painful to generate valid Rust code that compiles and does what I want than e.g. valid python code that runs and does what I want.

i think it's pretty clear that some of "the things you expect to make an LLM good at a language" (like strong typing) are not actually the case. other things like "don't indirect your code by jumping to something unexpected" might be more important.

Re: I tried Gleam for Advent of Code

#48
post #14

Gleam is a great language. It didn't click for me when I was trying it out, but I'm glad to see more people enjoying it. And I wonder if Gleam + Lustre could become the new Elm.

As a mostly back end dev Elm looked really nice but all the conflict with the creator and then the lack of compiler releases made me shy away a bit. I have bumped into "the Elm architecture" in other projects though and it was nice.

Yeah I'm not a front end dev but I do kind of keep track of what's going on in that space. From what I saw it seemed Elm was all but dead. Maybe that's not true, but that was the impression from the outside looking in.

Re: I tried Gleam for Advent of Code

#49

One thing im wondering with the LLM age we seem to be entering: is there value in picking up a language like this if theres not going to be a corpus of training data for an LLM to learn from? Id like to invest the time to learn Gleam, but I treat a language as a tool, or a means to an end. I feel like more and more I'm reaching for the tool to get the job done most easily, which are languages that LLMs seem to gel wi…

I hope this isn't the future of "new" languages. Hopefully newer AI tools can actually learn a language and they won't be the limiting factor.

I think as ai tools actually learn languages that functional languages will win out as they are much easier to reason about.

Re: I tried Gleam for Advent of Code

#50
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually agree. I don’t even use them in my private code. I will look into removing them from my blog!

For a quick fix: `font-variant-ligatures: none;` on body or similar.

I have this as !important in a global userStyle for code, pre, kbd, samp elements.
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