by jazzypants on 10/6/24, 10:21 PM
> I won’t fall into the trap of trying to define Monads in this post. Instead, let’s talk about monadic-style APIs – that is, APIs that allow you to do a bunch of things one after another, with the ability to use the result of a previous computation in the next computation, and also allows some logic to happen between steps.
Am I crazy, or did he just give a really good definition of monads in programming? I think that it benefits by not letting itself get bogged down in Category Theory nomenclature which doesn't actually matter when programming.
by atemerev on 10/6/24, 6:43 PM
The greatest power of BEAM-based languages is the fully preemptive actor model. Nobody else supports it. This is a superpower, the solution of most problems with concurrent programming.
In Erland and Elixir, actors and actor-based concurrency hold the central place in the corresponding ecosystems, well supported by extensive documentation.
In Gleam, actors and OTP are an afterthought. They are there somewhere, but underdocumented and abandoned.
by skybrian on 10/7/24, 2:24 AM
Gleam's 1.0 release was in May and it's still adding major features.
JavaScript support looks interesting. Browsing the package repo, I don't see how to tell which packages are supported on Erlang's VM, when compiling to JavaScript, or both. JavaScript-specific documentation seems pretty thin so far?
by patte on 10/6/24, 7:47 PM
This is a very concise overview! I have made a small example chat app [1] to explore two interesting aspects of gleam: BEAM OTP and compilation to javascript (typescript actually). If anyone is interested...
[1]: https://github.com/patte/gleam-playground
by rossng on 10/6/24, 7:04 PM
The `use` syntax is interesting - don't recall seeing anything similar before. But I'm struggling to understand how exactly it is executed and a glance at the Gleam docs didn't help.
Is the `use` statement blocking (in which case it doesn't seem that useful)? Or does it return immediately and then await at the point of use of the value it binds?
by fire_lake on 10/6/24, 7:55 PM
Gleam looks nice but if an F# comparisons was added, I think that would come out ahead based on the authors priorities.
by steve_adams_86 on 10/6/24, 6:41 PM
Wow, this is a great overview. I’ve been playing with Gleam a bit and this was really helpful. I’ll definitely refer to this later.
I’d like to dig into the OTP library (I’m curious if anyone has worked with it much?) and create a state chart library with it, but I’m still firmly in the “I don’t totally get it” camp with a few parts of Gleam. I don’t deny that it’s pragmatic. Maybe it’s more so that I’m not up to speed on functional patterns in general. I was for years, but took a hiatus to write code for a game engine and supporting infrastructure. It was so Wild West, but I kind of liked it in the end. Lots of impure, imperative code, haha.
by beanjuiceII on 10/6/24, 6:35 PM
tried gleam but the fact i have to manually serialize/deserialize things, pretty annoying, that doesn't seem very pragmatic
by Degorath on 10/7/24, 5:19 PM
I understand why the `use` syntax is preferable for its generalizability to many different "callback style" things, but the whole construct of `use foo <- result.try(bar())` is so much worse than defining let* in ocaml and being able to write `let* foo = bar() in`...
by amelius on 10/7/24, 9:34 AM
> Running on the battle-tested Erlang virtual machine that powers planet-scale systems such as WhatsApp and Ericsson, Gleam is ready for workloads of any size.
Does a Gleam programmer in practice need to deal with Erlang? Do Erlang error messages leak through?
by d--b on 10/7/24, 6:32 AM
Doesn’t it compare mostly to F#, rather than Haskell or OCaml? The examples in the post really look like F# to me
by ogogmad on 10/8/24, 8:38 AM
Is there a way to implement matrix arithmetic with nice syntax (for instance, "A + B" to add two matrices A and B) in Gleam? The lack of ad-hoc polymorphism might paradoxically be a blessing.
by vivzkestrel on 10/7/24, 3:27 AM
newbie here, how does gleam compare to golang, rust and python?
by behnamoh on 10/6/24, 6:54 PM
It's not pragmatic if you have to import these basic libs:
```
import gleam/dict.{type Dict}
import gleam/int
import gleam/io
import gleam/result
import gleam/string
```
by zombot on 10/7/24, 8:44 AM
The syntax doesn't look like it supports partial application? Big no-no. Also, no compilation to native code. Another big no-no.