Is the code for this demo available somewhere? It would be great to learn how to implement actors like this for someone new to Gleam and/or Erlang in general. Thank you!
The release of Gleam couldn’t have come at a worse time, the language is approachable but with Elixir getting types and the ever increasing groundswell beneath Elixir… Gleam will soon be a footnote. I wish the author had leaned in more, kudos nonetheless.
That would indeed be sad, but I actually think they cater to very different types of programmers. It's not just static vs dynamic typing that differentiates the languages. Elixir has macros and function overloading and is extensible and feature heavy. Gleam is simple and small tries to have no magic and have most peoples code look the same. I don't think these languages will compete so much as offer different avenues for benefiting from the BEAM ecosystem depending on your needs and tastes. I think a die hard Go fan would shun Elixir and love Gleam, whereas a veteran Ruby developer would not love Gleam but be very comfortable in Elixir.
@@bcpeinhardt Diehard Go user here ... not necessarily a "fan" - but I do value simple tools that do 1 thing well, are clear, explicit, and easy to reason about. Go is awesome for all of that. I wouldn't touch Gleam with a 10 foot pole. I don't necessarily agree that Gleam is aimed at programmers who want static typing and simplicity vs Elixir. I think the primary purpose of Gleam is appeal to existing Rust users who want to use a Rust-Like language for the BEAM. The whole problem with Gleam is Rust. It's written in Rust, by hardcore Rust "fans", with hardcore Rust "values". All of that has carried across to the Gleam project by the look of it. That's a no-go for me. I made a strong promise to myself years ago that I wouldn't have anything to do with Rust, or projects that happen to use Rust, but advertise "Im written in Rust" as if it was one of the project's primary features. For me - that's just a massive Red Flag for any tooling, and Im not willing to invest time writing code in a tool that is part of some religious movement. It's just too dangerous to do that. Im not alone in thinking that either. It also means that Gleam's appeal is going to be limited to people who are already rabid members of "the faith", or who don't care about the risks. Which is a shame, because there are some technical merits to having a C-like language with static typing that can output BEAM code. End of the day, it's only syntax though. Im comfortable with Elixir, and I actually like writing straight Erlang as well. So Im not missing out on anything by refusing to touch Gleam.
Just like the guy said in the keynote that Gleam can interact with JS, Elixir, and Erlang. Even if Elixir got more popular it would only be a net positive for all Beam languages.
gleam is great at typing, right but differences with elixir is not just about typing gleam has some very nice features that makes it a very cool language error messages in gleam are great, i.e I also like some decisions on language and libraries on gleam to write less coupled code on typing, elixir will be different. I hope elixir will do a great job on typing On gleam typing, we have full typing, full inference, nice syntax, opaque types, phantom types...
