The Gleam Programming Language

Post by lpil » Wed, Jan 14, 2026, 2:26 PM UTC

rkangel wrote: post #107

lpil wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the same as Elixir, you need to specify what Erlang function to use in that language if you want to use Erlang code. The only difference is that Gleam has a more verbose syntax for it.

In Elixir you just call the Erlang function directly. It's basically the same as calling an Elixir function, just with a different naming convention. In Gleam, you first have to declare the function type and THEN you can call the function directly. This is probably the lightest way you can bridge between statically and dynamically typed languages, but it's not the same as Elixir.

Post by heliumtera » Wed, Jan 14, 2026, 2:49 PM UTC

__jonas wrote: post #81

heliumtera wrote: post #69

One of the best things about erlang/elixir is the repl driven development/manual testing. Gleam has no `interpreted` story, right? Something like clojure, common lisp, etc. I think this matters because debugging on beam is not THAT great, there are tools in erlang/elixir to facilitate debugging, like inspect() or dbg(). If anyone has experience in this language, what is the mindset with gleam? How you guys debug?

> If anyone has experience in this language, what is the mindset with gleam? How you guys debug? There is the echo keyword now, which is comparable to elixir's dbg(), I use that a lot. Lacking a REPL, what I normally do is make a dev module, like 'dev/playground.gleam' where I'm testing things out (this is something that the gleam compiler supports, /dev is similar to /test) and then run it with 'gleam run -m playgro…

Post by librasteve » Wed, Jan 14, 2026, 2:52 PM UTC

preommr wrote: post #86

librasteve wrote: post #37

thought I’d try the showcase example in Raku ( https://raku.org ), so this Gleam import gleam/io pub fn main() { io.println("hello, friend!") } becomes this Raku say “hello, friend!” well maybe you really want to have a main() so you can pass in name from the command line #!/usr/bin/env raku sub MAIN($name) { say "hello, $name!” }

Oh God, they actually put that awful logo front and center. I'd always thought it would be a go-like thing where the put the mascot away for everything except for the minor hero section or buried in the footer. RIP Perl.

Post by akanapuli » Wed, Jan 14, 2026, 2:56 PM UTC

Post by librasteve » Wed, Jan 14, 2026, 3:04 PM UTC

tasuki wrote: post #108

librasteve wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love coding in Raku - and I am sure that Gleam is nice too. But I get the feeling that Raku is underappreciated / dismissed by many due to the perl5 / perl6 history. So my thinking is, when I see a new language showcase an example on their website, presumably a carefully chosen snippet that showcases their language at its best, I like to see how Raku compares to that. You know the take-aways from the comparison are…

> But I get the feeling that Raku is underappreciated / dismissed by many due to the perl5 / perl6 history. Yes that would be me! If you like making these comparisons, can you write the following pattern matching in Raku? import gleam/io pub type Fish { Starfish(name: String, favourite_colour: String) Jellyfish(name: String, jiggly: Bool) } pub fn main() { handle_fish(Starfish("Lucy", "Pink")) } fn handle_fish(fish:…

  role Fish { has Str $.name }

  class Starfish  does Fish { has Str $.favourite-colour; }
  class Jellyfish does Fish { has Bool $.jiggly }

  sub handle-fish(Fish $fish) {
    given $fish {
      when Starfish  { say .favourite-colour }
      when Jellyfish { say .name }
    }   
  }

  handle-fish Starfish.new: :name("Lucy"), :favourite-colour("Pink");

  role Fish { has Str $.name }

  class Starfish  does Fish { has Str $.favourite-colour; }
  class Jellyfish does Fish { has Bool $.jiggly }

  multi sub handle-fish(Starfish  $fish) { say $fish.favourite-colour }
  multi sub handle-fish(Jellyfish $fish) { say $fish.name }

  handle-fish Starfish.new: :name("Lucy"), :favourite-colour("Pink");