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I tried Gleam for Advent of Code

blog.tymscar.com

81–90 of 223 posts

Re: I tried Gleam for Advent of Code

#81
post #55
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…

> I fear LLMs have frozen programming language advancement and adoption for anything past 2021. 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…

The motivation isn’t there to create new languages for humans when you’re programming at a higher level of abstraction now (AI prompting).

It’d be like inventing a new assembly language when everyone is writing code in higher level languages that compile to assembly.

I hope it’s not true, but I believe that’s what OP meant and I think the concern is valid!

Re: I tried Gleam for Advent of Code

#82

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 recently built something in Hare (a very niche new language), and Claude Code was helpful. No where near as good as it is with TypeScript. But it was good enough that I don’t LLMs being in the top 5 reasons a language would fail to get adopted.

Re: I tried Gleam for Advent of Code

#83
post #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).

Anecdotically I recently got into Ruby, via Sinatra, and enjoy the experience.

What are you lacking in ruby and rails, besides the types?

Re: I tried Gleam for Advent of Code

#84

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…

Of course there is, especially if you believe that LLMs further improve on reasoning.

Re: I tried Gleam for Advent of Code

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If you're fortunate, you can find companies with a passion for good code who use lesser-known languages. Picking Erlang, or Haskell, or OCaml generally filters out candidates who don't share your interest in seeing what can be done outside the mainstream.

It's funny you mention Haskell, because it's one of those languages many love but can't find jobs in it even if they halved their salaries.

Re: I tried Gleam for Advent of Code

#86
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Llms are already good at churning boilerplate, so the next step really is making them good as so they develop taste and architectural consistency imho.

Re: I tried Gleam for Advent of Code

#87
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I fear LLMs have frozen programming language advancement and adoption for anything past 2021. 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…

The motivation isn’t there to create new languages for humans when you’re programming at a higher level of abstraction now (AI prompting). It’d be like inventing a new assembly language when everyone is writing code in higher level languages that compile to assembly. I hope it’s not true, but I believe that’s what OP meant and I think the concern is valid!

> It’d be like inventing a new assembly language when everyone is writing code in higher level languages that compile to assembly.

Isn't that what WASM is? Or more or less what is going on when people devise a new intermediate representation for a new virtual machine? Creating new assembly languages is a useful thing that people continue to do!

Re: I tried Gleam for Advent of Code

#88
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I fear LLMs have frozen programming language advancement and adoption for anything past 2021. 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…

The motivation isn’t there to create new languages for humans when you’re programming at a higher level of abstraction now (AI prompting). It’d be like inventing a new assembly language when everyone is writing code in higher level languages that compile to assembly. I hope it’s not true, but I believe that’s what OP meant and I think the concern is valid!

We may end up using AI to create simplified bespoke subset languages that fit our preferences. Like a DSL of sorts but with better performance characteristics than a traditional DSL and a small enough surface area.

Re: I tried Gleam for Advent of Code

#89
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What do you mean?

Re: I tried Gleam for Advent of Code

#90
post #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).

I've considered playing around with it. Every now and then I tell myself I'm gonna learn front end dev, but as soon as I start looking at it (FE in general not Lustre specifically) I get depressed and give up lol
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