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Comment by giancarlostoro

10 hours ago

Erlang is one of those runtimes I've loved since learning about it all the way back in 2008, but I never took time to learn the syntax, but Elixir and Gleam have had me fiddling with the Erlang VM over the years. Happy to see Gleam growing into maturity.

28 comments

giancarlostoro

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ryan-duve  8 hours ago

I just learned Erlang this year and I love the syntax. Ending expressions with periods took getting used to, but capital first letters distinguishing variables, non-rebindable variables, semicolons between function clauses, a lack of boilerplate (defmodule et al), a fraction of end keywords, commas separating expression, ... all make for a very fun to use and ergonomic language, IMO.

I haven't tried Gleam yet, though. I'm interested in the focus on simplicity but a little wary because I understand they sacrificed niceties to minimize the language footprint, e.g., pattern matching in function heads. I intend to give it a shot the next time I'm greenfielding something.

  • mahboi  4 hours ago

    Erlang is my favorite functional language out of all the ones I've tried. The matchers, guards, etc are all done very well. But I don't like functional. I used to think it was cool, gave it a real chance using Erlang for years, and eventually decided it's not a good fit for many use cases. Like at some point the neatness of doing all loops as recursion wears off and it's just tiring. It's not like CS algo homework, and even there you often want DP/memoization.

    Edit: pure* functional

    • sodapopcan  3 hours ago

      > Like at some point the neatness of doing all loops as recursion wears off and it's just tiring.

      Odd, but I believe you, lol. Elixir's list comprehensions take a `:reduce` option which makes accumulating values a bit more "familiar" and I often use over `reduce`:

          for a <- list, reduce: []
      acc ->
        [a | acc]
    end

      Not sure if there is something like that in Erlang (or Gleam for that matter).

      2 replies →

  • SoftTalker  5 hours ago

    I'm the same. I thought I was an oddball because so many people seemed to prefer Elixir but I like Erlang and its syntax. I wish I had more chances to use it at work but so far it's just been for hobby projects or playing with.

  • macintux  4 hours ago

    I was fortunate enough to use Erlang professionally for a couple of years. I agree: the syntax is quite comfortable.

ch4s3  9 hours ago

I'd say if you know and like Rust, then Gleam should be easy to pick up but otherwise I'd try Elixir. You can learn most of the language in a few days and be experimenting with BEAM and supervision concepts basically on day one. As a learning exercise I think its worth peoples' time because actors/processes are one of the concurrency models you don't see everywhere but solve interesting problems well.