Try Gleam

nchagnet 125 points 127 comments November 09, 2026
nchagnet.eu · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (9 comments)

nchagnet

I wrote this to show my appreciation of this small-ish but beautiful language.

micbas

Naive question: why do we care about programming languages when we no longer read programming languages directly? Shouldn't we either design languages optimized for LLMs? (needs fewer tokens, easier for bots to process, easier to machine verify, not sure what else)

adamddev1

Gleam is really a delightful language with great ideas, but the lack of currying is a tragedy. Missing currying feels a little to me like walking in FP land with one leg cut off.

hmokiguess

To your point on "Gleam: the bad" and the ecosystem being small, I would add that this community has a history of activism behaviour. Some like that, I'm out.

barddoo

I've been keen to try it out for a while, I might do something with it in the near future.

subarctic

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.

listedb

Hey! I know this!

stiiv

Apart from the language, what's the developer experience like, especially doing full-stack? F# showed a lot of promise with Fable, but the community never quite got the tooling right, I think for a lack of energy/funding.

brightball

Had a great talk on Gleam at the Carolina Code Conference a couple of years ago by Dillon Mulroy, now with Cloudflare I believe. https://carolina.codes/speakers/2024/dillon-mulroy That site is also partially powered by Gleam on the backend.

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