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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

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 :)

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.