Gleam Is Pragmatic

Re:Gleam Is Pragmatic by steve_adams_86 on Sunday October 06, 2024 @02:41PM (#41759143)

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.

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Re:Gleam Is Pragmatic by okkdev on Sunday October 06, 2024 @03:29PM (#41759548)

Most people use the OTP lib! There's this super useful intro repo: https://github.com/bcpeinhardt/learn_otp_with_gleam

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Re:Gleam Is Pragmatic by steve_adams_86 on Sunday October 06, 2024 @04:27PM (#41760025)

Incredible, thank you so much! This is exactly what I need.

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Re:Gleam Is Pragmatic by conradludgate on Sunday October 06, 2024 @06:04PM (#41760720)

I've tried to get my head around functional programming and also OTP but I also just never got my head around it.

Functional programming seems too limiting and OTP seems more complicated than I would have hoped for a supposedly distributed concurrency system.

I'm sure it's just a skill issue on my part. Right now I'm way too rust-brained. I've heard lots of things about gleam being good for productivity but I don't feel unproductive writing web apps in Rust but I felt every unproductive trying to write a non-trivial web app in gleam

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Re:Gleam Is Pragmatic by giacomocava on Monday October 07, 2024 @06:18AM (#41764515)

Yeah FP can for sure take some getting used to before it clicks! I think a great resource for that is Gleam's Exercism track (https://exercism.org/tracks/gleam), not only will it teach you the language but by starting with small-ish exercises it can definitely help grokking FP concepts

And if you feel like you're stuck and need help Gleam's Discord is a great place to ask questions :)

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Re:Gleam Is Pragmatic by cdelsolar on Monday October 07, 2024 @09:33AM (#41765848)

I agree. I've been trying to learn functional programming for years. My brain just doesn't get it. And I've actually built a non-trivial web app in Elm, and started trying to write one in Gleam and I was very very slow and unproductive. Eventually I gave up and wrote the whole thing in Go + TS for the frontend.

For Gleam I was trying to write the whole FE + BE in the same language - I really like that it can be compiled to JS, and I'm honestly sick of the whole React + seven thousand dependencies game, so I was using Lustre (an Elm-like library for Gleam). And again, I've programmed an app in Elm, after a lot of hair pulling, and in the end I didn't enjoy it that much.

I've gone through tutorials and I don't understand things like types having different wildly unrelated constructors, currying (I didn't notice much currying in Gleam but really disliked it in Elm, I cannot follow past the first or second arrow). For writing the front end of the app, I would make _zero_ progress unless referring to other Github projects (and it was hard to find any since Gleam was so new). Anyway, if someone has a book or something that can teach me this stuff it would be great. I want to use the OTP and a single language for FE/BE that's not JS. I'm not dumb, I've been programming since I was a little kid, but maybe I'm too stuck in imperative models.

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