Comment by lpil
10 hours ago
I think a Rust programmer is more likely to prefer Gleam to Elixir, but I don't think there is much link between Gleam and Rust, and I especially do not thing that Gleam should only be considered over Elixir if you are already a Rust programmer.
So I said:
> I'd say if you know and like Rust, then Gleam should be easy to pick up
And you think that:
> a Rust programmer is more likely to prefer Gleam to Elixir
Are we maybe splitting hairs here?
You said: >I'd say if you know and like Rust, then Gleam should be easy to pick up but otherwise I'd try Elixir.
This is way too strong and narrow statement. Gleam is statically typed garbage collected language, closer to OCaml than Rust. Elixir if you like dynamically typed instead.
Obligatory comment that elixir is now gradually typed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48388324
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It's very possible that I'm misunderstanding you! I'm mostly just saying that Gleam is very unlike Rust, so if you pick it or avoid it for Rust related reasons you may not be making the most informed decision.
The languages that Gleam is most like might be Standard ML, OCaml, Elm, and F#.
You seem to be interpreting the statements as technical comparisons of the languages, but ch4s3 was (by my read) commenting on the overall ability of a programmer to jump from one language to another.
That is: they aren't similar languages on a technical level, but if you know Rust, you should be able to make the jump to Gleam pretty quickly.
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> The languages that Gleam is most like might be Standard ML, OCaml, Elm, and F#.
And guess which languages inspired several things in Rust.
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I use Rust and prefer Elixir over Gleam because Elixir has Lisp-style macros (Gleam doesn't), uses OTP directly, has the fantastic IEx REPL (Gleam has no counterpart), and has Phoenix, the best web framework I've ever used.
Yes, exactly my point! Being a Rust user doesn’t mean you are going to prefer or even understand Gleam.