51–60 of 223 posts
I've looked at Gleam before but it didn't seem to have any mechanism for dynamic dispatch like interfaces or type classes. Did it change in the meantime?
I've looked at Gleam before but it didn't seem to have any mechanism for dynamic dispatch like interfaces or type classes. Did it change in the meantime?
Both of type classes and interfaces desugar to high order functions, so anything you write with them can be written with first class functions, though with a less concise API.
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.
document.body.style.setProperty('font-variant-ligatures','none','important');Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The advantage rather for llms in strongly typed languages is that compilers can catch errors early and give the model early automated feedback so you don’t have to.
With weakly typed (and typically interpreted) languages they will need to run the code which maybe quite slow to do so or not realistic.
Simply put agentic coding loops prefer stronger static analysis capabilities.
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…
Why would that be the case? Many models have knowledge cutoffs in this calendar year. Furthermore I’ve found that LLMs are generally pretty good at picking up new (or just obscure) languages as long as you have a few examples. As wide and varied as programming languages are, syntactically and ideologically they can only be so different.
I've looked at Gleam before but it didn't seem to have any mechanism for dynamic dispatch like interfaces or type classes. Did it change in the meantime?
Gleam has first class functions, so it has dynamic dispatch. Both of type classes and interfaces desugar to high order functions, so anything you write with them can be written with first class functions, though with a less concise API.
Of course dynamic dispatch can be implemented in almost every language. The Linux kernel uses dynamic dispatch with C!
But that's a hack, not a language feature.
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…
The comment you are replying to is correct, and you are incorrect.
All OTP APIs are usable as normal within Gleam, the language is designed with it in mind, and there’s an additional set of Gleam specific additions to OTP (which you have linked there).
Gleam does not have access to only a subset of OTP, and it does not have its own distinct OTP inspired OTP. It uses the OTP framework.
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…
If you just see language as a tool, unless you’re self employed or working in open source, wouldn’t the lack of job market demand for it be the first blocker?
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.
Positive:
- It can be pretty performant if you do it right. For example, with some thought I got many days down to double digit microseconds. That said, you do need to be careful how you write it and many patterns that work well in other languages fall flat in Gleam.
- The language server is incredibly good. It autoformats, autocompletes even with functions from not-yet-imported-but-known-to-the-compiler packages, shows hints with regarding to code style and can autofix many of these, autofills missing patterns in pattern matches, automatically imports new packages when you start using them and much much more. It has definitely redefined my view of what an LSP can do for a language.
- The language is generally a joy to work with. The core team has put a lot of effort into devex and it shows. The pipe operator is nice as always, the type system is no haskell but is expressive enough, and in general it has a lot of well-thought out interactions that you only notice after using it for a while.
Negative:
- The autoformatter can be a bit overly aggressive in rewriting (for example) a single line function call with many arguments to a function call with each argument on a different line. I get that not using "too much" horizontal space is important, but using up all my vertical space instead is not always better.
- The language (on purpose) focuses a lot on simplicity over terseness, but sometimes it gets a little bit much. Having to type `list.map` instead of `map` or `dict.Dict` instead `Dict` a hundred times does add up over the course of a few weeks, and does not really add a lot of extra readability. OTOH, I have also seen people who really really like this part of Gleam so YMMV.
- Sometimes the libraries are a bit lacking. There are no matrix libraries as far as I could find. One memoisation library had a mid-AoC update to fix it after the v1.0 release had broken it but nobody noticed for months. The maintainer did push out a fix within a day of realizing it was broken though. The ones that exist and are maintained are great though.