My first impressions of Gleam

Posted by AlexeyBrin 23 hours ago

My first impressions of Gleam(mtlynch.io)

196 points | 69 commentspage 2

IncreasePosts 22 hours ago|

I'm glad I'm not the only one who hoarded all their AIM log data. Whenever I want to cringe I can pull up a random file

scuff3d 19 hours ago||

I tried with Gleam, I really wanted to like it. I really like Louis Pilfold and I like his goals for the language. But something about it just didn't click for me. It's a good language, but at the end of the day I just didn't enjoy writing it.

It might be something the author talked about, but I think the language might be too small. It's one of the things I dislike about Rust too. I prefer a more batteries included approach because I can't stand having to pull in a bunch of small dependencies.

jitl 13 hours ago||

Rust is a HUGE language with a small stdlib. Gleam is a small language with a small stdlib.

scuff3d 13 hours ago||

Yes, thank you for pointing that out...

My point was about the need to rely on external libraries. I'm not a fan of that approach. I don't care for it in Rust or JavaScript, and I get a similar vibe from Gleam.

jitl 9 hours ago||

Agree. My dream:

Go stdlib and tooling

A good programming language

scuff3d 5 hours ago||

Odin?

renox 3 hours ago||

Not the GP but while Odin has a syntax similar to Go, it has manual memory management instead of a GC, that's a pretty big difference.

garbthetill 13 hours ago||

Im on the same boat and this is coming from someone who loves the beam thanks to elixir, I think the marketing of the lang threw me of a bit. But I might give it a try this week, as im feeling a bit burnt out with elixir

earlier this week I was thinking why aren't there more languages around the actor model and completely forgot gleam exists

librasteve 16 hours ago||

thanks for posting this --- very interesting to read the "first impressions of FP" side of it

to be honest, I felt like shouting "please try raku" (https://raku.org) after about 4 paragraphs!

why? well raku Grammars are built in parsers...

effnorwood 15 hours ago||

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curtisszmania 19 hours ago||

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lordofgibbons 22 hours ago||

Gleam has caught my eye for the past year or so, and I'd totally learn it if I didn't believe firmly that we won't be coding by hand within the next 9 months. It'll all be done by LLMs so syntax and ergonomics won't mean too much. At least as soon as LLMs learn to stop being turbo-slop generators.

IshKebab 19 hours ago||

9 months? I mean... 9 years maybe. There's absolutely no way we won't be coding by hand in 9 months, unless the only thing you do is landing pages and CRUD forms.

sgt 18 hours ago|||

Not even 9 years, I'm thinking 30-40 years.

arcanemachiner 19 hours ago|||

Never underestimate the ability of the software industry to shit in its own mouth.

buggy6257 22 hours ago|||

See you in 9 months then to check back.

tgv 19 hours ago||

Anthropic's CEO said 6 months, 6 months ago. https://futurism.com/six-months-anthropic-coding

a3w 21 hours ago|||

Doe LLMs write valid Gleam programs? Trying with ChatGPT three years ago, it did not. Workarounds, like "here is the syntax as a system prompt", put into the prompt I would not consider understanding, as Gleam idioms and patterns will certainly not all fit.

adastra22 20 hours ago||

GP is crazy, but if you are basing your view of what LLMs can do based on ChatGPT 3 years ago, that is just as much out of touch.

0x3f 22 hours ago|||

You should learn Gleam then.

echelon 21 hours ago||

> if I didn't believe firmly that we won't be coding by hand within the next 9 months.

LLM-assisted coding is awesome, but it feels like a self-driving style problem.

It's going to take 20 years to get there.

back2dafucha 22 hours ago|

The only languages Im interested in are future proof AI resistant languages. Since LLMs need alot of training (because they cant read language ASTs and write code correctly), a language that either isnt possible to express using fonts and character sets on the Internet, can only live in a private cloud, and is known to only verified practitioners runs on everything, and yet cant be decompiled.

You can launch a nuclear war in 5 lines of Visual Basic. I want a language AI doesnt know and cannot ever know.

flexagoon 21 hours ago||

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malbolge

tgv 19 hours ago||

I suggest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_%28programming_lang..., which consists purely of white space, which isn't tokenized by LLMs. The code is very easy on the eye.

jcmontx 21 hours ago|||

You better start writing your own compilers then

MomsAVoxell 3 hours ago||

This, however, has always been true and is not just an issue of AI.

DetroitThrow 22 hours ago||

>and cannot ever know

It might be resistant to human uptake in that case, too? Brett Victor I suppose has some interesting human-first or human-only physical computers.

back2dafucha 22 hours ago||

Thats ok. We have done enough language research to build another powerhouse language that is AI resistant that practitioners can use. Its uptake is only relevant to those that wish to exclude LLMs from the picture to resist the agents. When LLM agents are everywhere secret societies will become the norm.

We may even have the expertise to actually transpile every single program into a unique programming language so that if the source were available LLM bots would not recognize it in any volume enough to learn from it.