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I tried Gleam for Advent of Code

blog.tymscar.com

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Re: I tried Gleam for Advent of Code

#31

Post by chongli »

torben-friis wrote: post #9
threethirtytwo wrote: post #7

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…

Perhaps this is a silly question but how do you do functional with no generics? Arent they pretty much required for map/reduce/filter?

There are multiple levels of possible generics at play here: the container type and the element type. You can have a map/reduce/filter that operate on any element type (generic elements) while still being specialized to linked lists. On the other hand, you might prefer a generic map that can operate on any container type and any element type, so that you can use the same map method and the same function to map over arrays of numbers, sets of numbers, lists of numbers, trees of numbers, or even functions of numbers!

Haskell allows both sorts of generics. In Haskell parlance they call this higher-kinded polymorphism and the generic version of map they call fmap (as a method of the class Functor).

Re: I tried Gleam for Advent of Code

#32

Post by jszymborski »

victorbjorklund wrote: post #17
marliechiller wrote: post #2

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.

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.

Re: I tried Gleam for Advent of Code

#33

Post by akkad33 »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #7

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…

Why does it need generics? There's a great blog post about how you can replace a lot of trait behaviour with just functions. Maybe something like that can be done for generics

Re: I tried Gleam for Advent of Code

#37

Post by agos »

bnchrch wrote: 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…

the Erlang vm is called BEAM, not OTP. sadly, Gleam's implementation of OTP is not at the same level as Elixir's or Erlang.

Re: I tried Gleam for Advent of Code

#38

Post by agos »

victorbjorklund wrote: post #17
marliechiller wrote: post #2

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.

in my daily experience Claude Code writes better Elixir code than JS (React). Surely this has to do with the quality of the training material

Re: I tried Gleam for Advent of Code

#39

Post by seritools »

tymscar wrote: post #36
periodjet wrote: post #34

Ruined by ligatures. Use them in your own private coding time, not when trying to communicate with others. It obfuscates rather than clarifies.

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.

Re: I tried Gleam for Advent of Code

#40

Post by nonethewiser »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #7

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.
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