Shout out to Giacomo's twitch streams. He has taught me about some features of Gleam, Rust, and on top of that he's just a very chill person. He takes time away from his focus to answer questions politely and without judgement. There are dozens of programming streams where the streamer forgets to leave their ego at the door and he is not one of them. I highly recommend following it.
Gleam is such a beautiful language. I wish I had the opportunity to use it more. If it could compile (transpile) to a native target like rust or go, it would be truly perfect.
to those curious, erlang abstract form[1] is the AST representation used by the erlang compiler/etc. per [1], you can see that it's canonically made of erlang terms, and you have easy access to routines for manipulating this representation from the standard library; it's really comfy when you need it! it's also the target elixir compiles down to, and the representation manipulated by parse transforms, which in base erlang are the way syntactic sugar (notably qlc[2] and some of the more cutesy pattern matches in merl[3] (which, in turn, manipulates the very same representation to do its job. very meta!)) is done.
most BEAM languages actually settle on erlang abstract format. you'd think core erlang would be more common since it feels more like a traditional functional IR, but basically only LFE does this, because it's a moving target without any particular stability guarantees from release to release.
This raises an obvious question. Why Gleam team weren't doing that in the first place? Obviously they didn't have direct Gleam AST -> Erlang source pipeline, they must have had to build some their own custom Erlang AST representation that they then translated into the source code.
Before the "and", "but", "so", "while", etc. — while most European languages, indeed, (usually) require commas before conjunctions, English is following a somewhat reversed convention. Well, at least the author remembered that they need to omit a comma before "that".
idk, i'm not sure about wording.
erlang abstract form still is erlang source, it's ast of erlang source text.
one call to erl_prettypr:format and text source is back.
word 'transpiler' is still there and there is nothing "pejorative" in it, it's transpilers all the way down everywhere.
but talking pejorative, i was surprised.
my opinion of gleam was already pretty low, but i did not expect to see post-1.0 compiler emitting text erlang source.
maybe it's not that good of idea to implement compiler in language completely foreign to target ecosystem.
Shout out to Giacomo's twitch streams. He has taught me about some features of Gleam, Rust, and on top of that he's just a very chill person. He takes time away from his focus to answer questions politely and without judgement. There are dozens of programming streams where the streamer forgets to leave their ego at the door and he is not one of them. I highly recommend following it.
...And he animates his presentations by hand-drawing each frame transition, which speaks volumes.
[edit - this might have been ambiguous. I meant that it shows he really cares about the fine details.]
Do you have an example you especially like?
not from a presentation but he made this nice little syntax postcard https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did:plc:vzaxc2i...
Yes! https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/gleam-and-the-value-of-small/...
yea he is super nice.
Gleam is such a beautiful language. I wish I had the opportunity to use it more. If it could compile (transpile) to a native target like rust or go, it would be truly perfect.
bot comment
to those curious, erlang abstract form[1] is the AST representation used by the erlang compiler/etc. per [1], you can see that it's canonically made of erlang terms, and you have easy access to routines for manipulating this representation from the standard library; it's really comfy when you need it! it's also the target elixir compiles down to, and the representation manipulated by parse transforms, which in base erlang are the way syntactic sugar (notably qlc[2] and some of the more cutesy pattern matches in merl[3] (which, in turn, manipulates the very same representation to do its job. very meta!)) is done.
most BEAM languages actually settle on erlang abstract format. you'd think core erlang would be more common since it feels more like a traditional functional IR, but basically only LFE does this, because it's a moving target without any particular stability guarantees from release to release.
1: https://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/stdlib/erl_parse.html#t:abst...
2: https://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/stdlib/qlc.html#q/2
3: https://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/syntax_tools/merl.html
This raises an obvious question. Why Gleam team weren't doing that in the first place? Obviously they didn't have direct Gleam AST -> Erlang source pipeline, they must have had to build some their own custom Erlang AST representation that they then translated into the source code.
Pretty exciting change that I didn’t see coming —- I wonder if someone will end up implementing an integration with the Whatsapp Erlang debugger
Amazing news! Thank you!
Let me guess: still no string interpolation in a language ostensibly intended for building user interfaces?
gleam is very much a language of "no" which if you like that, cool, if not, also cool :)
Congratulations to the team! I love Gleam and am genuinely having fun every time I write Gleam code.
The misuse of commas is distracting; at least it’s better than reading ai blogs.
Which commas are misplaced?
Before the "and", "but", "so", "while", etc. — while most European languages, indeed, (usually) require commas before conjunctions, English is following a somewhat reversed convention. Well, at least the author remembered that they need to omit a comma before "that".
As a non-native English speaker I'm always so self conscious when using commas, it feels like I'm always using either too many or too few
As a native English speaker, same.
You're doing fine. English grammar pedants speak infrequently. Mostly due to the disinterest of the listener.
Apart from in Australian [0] and Canadian [1] English, where it is generally optional, but used where it can increase clarity or meter.
[0] Australian Government Publishing Service's Style Manual for Authors, Editors and Printers, ISBN: 978 0 7016 3648 7
[1] The Canadian style: a guide to writing and editing https://archive.org/details/canadianstylegui0000unse
You do need a comma before a conjunction if it connects two independent clauses.
Your semicolon would be more effective as a comma followed by "but". HTH
idk, i'm not sure about wording. erlang abstract form still is erlang source, it's ast of erlang source text. one call to erl_prettypr:format and text source is back. word 'transpiler' is still there and there is nothing "pejorative" in it, it's transpilers all the way down everywhere.
but talking pejorative, i was surprised. my opinion of gleam was already pretty low, but i did not expect to see post-1.0 compiler emitting text erlang source. maybe it's not that good of idea to implement compiler in language completely foreign to target ecosystem.