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I tried Gleam for Advent of Code

blog.tymscar.com

21–30 of 223 posts

Re: I tried Gleam for Advent of Code

#22

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 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.

There's certainly a lot more JS code out there to train on, but the quality of the Elixir code is likely overall much better.

Re: I tried Gleam for Advent of Code

#23

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…

Its pretty much the same thing as in every previous age, where not having a community of experience and the supporting materials they produce has been a disadvantage to early adopters of a new language, so the people that used it first were people with a particular need that it seemed to address that offset that for them, or that had a particular interest in being in the vanguard.

And those people are the people that develop the body of material that later people (and now LLMs) learn from.

Re: I tried Gleam for Advent of Code

#24

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…

Gleam isn’t a very unique language. The loss from generalizing may be less than the improved ergonomics, if not now then as LLMs improve.

I don't know Gleam at all so I can't comment on that specifically, but I think everyone has the experience of a coworker who writes C++ as if it's C or Python as if its Java or whatever else.

A language doesn't have to be unique to still have a particular taste associated with its patterns and idioms, and it would unfortunate if LLM influence had the effect of suppressing the ability for that new style to develop.

Re: I tried Gleam for Advent of Code

#25

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…

Seems like you are not target audience for these new languages and that is OK. But I guess there are still many people that want to try new things (on their own even).

Re: I tried Gleam for Advent of Code

#26

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…

In the medium to long term, if LLMs are unable to easily learn new languages and remap the knowledge they gained from training on different languages, then they will have failed in their mission of becoming a general intelligence.

Re: I tried Gleam for Advent of Code

#27
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.

Which conflicts? Gleam seems to be released often?

Re: I tried Gleam for Advent of Code

#28

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’m more interested in what happens when a language is designed specifically for llms? When doing vibe coding a lot of code is a lot more verbose than I’d do normally. Do we drop down the abstraction level because llms are just so good a churning out boilerplate?

Re: I tried Gleam for Advent of Code

#29
post #8

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 Gle…

> 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]"

Re: I tried Gleam for Advent of Code

#30
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which conflicts? Gleam seems to be released often?

The elm drama
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