Try Gleam - Hackdot

Re:Try Gleam by subarctic on Monday November 09, 2026 @08:20AM (#50425221)

I have a web app i've been using regularly and develop regularly with gleam on the frontend and backend. I have written very little of the code by hand and use claude to implement everything, open PRs and stuff and it works well. I like that it's typesafe and you can share code between the frontend and backend so easily, and you don't have to get a bunch of config right like you do if you want an all-typescript application. If I was writing it by hand I think I would find there's an annoying amount of boilerplate, but since ai is writing the code for me it's not a big deal.

Overall, I recommend it.

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Re:Try Gleam by mono442 on Monday November 09, 2026 @08:24AM (#50425283)

if the ai is writing everything wouldn't it be better to choose a more popular language?

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Re:Try Gleam by lpil on Monday November 09, 2026 @09:35AM (#50426227)

Why's that?

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Re:Try Gleam by tharmas on Monday November 09, 2026 @11:07AM (#50427452)

Lots and lots of production code to train AI models.

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Re:Try Gleam by lpil on Monday November 09, 2026 @11:11AM (#50427502)

Programming models have been sophisticated enough for some time to not be restricted to specific languages. It's rather like the difference between a junior developer (who knows how to use a specific language) and a mid developer (who knows who to program generally).

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Re:Try Gleam by jeremyjh on Monday November 09, 2026 @01:10PM (#50429214)

Thanks for creating Gleam!

Is there any research that supports what you are saying here? I agree it mostly works, but I’d expect more API hallucinations and test cycles at a minimum.

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Re:Try Gleam by ch4s3 on Monday November 09, 2026 @01:08PM (#50429175)

I'm not sure how much that matters. I suspect and anecdotally hear/see that compiler errors and docs are as/more important.

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Re:Try Gleam by giancarlostoro on Monday November 09, 2026 @01:11PM (#50429223)

That mindset is a bit dated when models can pull up docs for a few years now. You can even have it write itself a little guide for lesser known languages within its own agents file.

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Re:Try Gleam by perrygeo on Monday November 09, 2026 @01:36PM (#50429595)

The entire gleam language tour fits comfortably in a modern LLM context window. You're one web search away from "training" it yourself.

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Re:Try Gleam by benzible on Monday November 09, 2026 @01:23PM (#50429410)

Another BEAM-based language, Elixir, came in first in a recent agentic coding study: https://dashbit.co/blog/why-elixir-best-language-for-ai

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Re:Try Gleam by sczi on Monday November 09, 2026 @02:47PM (#50430853)

In that Tencent study less common languages got easier problems. Which explains why racket also performed suspiciously well in it. The authors recognize the problem themselves. I like elixir, but it's imo embarrassing how often elixir people cite that study despite it not actually supporting what they claim.

A much more recent and imo more realistic comparison of different languages with ai, is openai's study reimplementing sqlite in different languages: https://openai.com/index/low-resource-programming-languages/

That showed about what we expect, that popular languages like python, javascript, java, C#, etc do best, while less popular languages like Common Lisp, Ocaml, Zig, etc do slightly worse. But the difference is small enough I'd still just choose whatever language and ecosystem I know best that is appropriate for a project.

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Re:Try Gleam by yladiz on Monday November 09, 2026 @04:21PM (#50432359)

I would definitely be skeptical of a study that finds using an LLM/agent to write sqlite in JS being better than writing in Zig, but it strongly depends on what “better” or “worse” mean.

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Re:Try Gleam by sczi on Monday November 09, 2026 @04:32PM (#50432499)

It means how much of the sqlite test suite it passed. They were just measuring correctness, not performance or memory consumption, where of course Zig should win.

But the aim of that experiment was measuring correctness of llm written code in different languages, so used sqlite as a benchmark considering it's fairly complex software with a comprehensive test suite. It is not suggesting that because a language scores better on that benchmark it'd be better suited to writing the next sqlite, due to obvious other factors like performance...

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Re:Try Gleam by ModernMech on Monday November 09, 2026 @04:59PM (#50432856)

There’s just not enough information in the “study” to be helpful or informative though. It’s just a list of numbers with not enough methodology to reproduce them, so to me they’re no more meaningful than a press release.

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Re:Try Gleam by ModernMech on Monday November 09, 2026 @02:46PM (#50430828)

Exactly the opposite -- in a lot of ways, mainstream languages represent a compromise that gives the worst of all worlds for the benefit of popularity. With AI, you can take advantage of unpopular esoteric languages that have measurable advantages over mainstream languages. Before, the choice for a mainstream language was too strong because of network effects. Now with AI those effects don't matter as much, so being mainstream isn't as much of an advantage.

The copious training data on mainstream languages doesn't really translate as a network effect, and therefore is kind of a red herring because the AI can use all that training on new languages as well. e.g. if you use a esoteric language that is vaguely object oriented, the AI will use its vast training on object oriented programs and apply it to your language instead of falling over because your language isn't Python and it doesn't have training data on it.

Moreover, the AI is trained on copious amounts of PL research, so it's not like the ideas in a new language are completely new to it.

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Re:Try Gleam by doomspork on Monday November 09, 2026 @08:35AM (#50425398)

What framework did you use for Gleam? I feel the last time I looked that was one of the big absent libraries.

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Re:Try Gleam by whalesalad on Monday November 09, 2026 @02:09PM (#50430130)

this is what grinds my gears with gleam. afaik its not really possible to interact with elixir libraries? A project exists to try to make this 'easier' but the fact that it was not baked-in as first class is a huge smell to me https://github.com/gleam-lang/mix_gleam/

Perfect example: Clojure. Clojure is the textbook esoteric programmers dream... but it's SUPER easy to sell and integrate in a typical Java shop. Why? Clojure is Java. You can use everything on Maven. You can interop with any Java tooling. No hacks or BS required... it's a native compatibility. The fact that the Gleam did not opt for this level of congruence is mind boggling to me.

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Re:Try Gleam by jjtheblunt on Monday November 09, 2026 @04:32PM (#50432513)

is this not adequate?

https://gleam.run/frequently-asked-questions/#Can-I-use-Elix...

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Re:Try Gleam by hugeBirb on Monday November 09, 2026 @04:28PM (#50432443)

What's the fuckin point of any language ergonomic if you're not reading or writing it.

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