Ok Jasper what is this post about, wait it isn't NixOS.
That's right, today I'm covering my new love language Gleam, "a friendly language for building type-safe systems that scale".
So not long ago I was scrolling through YouTube and on my home page I saw this video by Isaac Harris-Holt. And I was blown away, "Wait I don't have to use Rust to make highly performant non-crashing services?".
I immediately fell in love with the language and proceeded to the Gleam Language Tour and besides the SvelteKit Tutorial, this is the best language guide I had ever seen. After only 2 days I felt I had a full grasp on the language.
"Ok Jasper cool, you have a crush on a new vague language I have never heard on, why do I care again?"
You care, my friend, because you no longer have to learn Rust to ensure your backend doesn't crash and you don't need to learn Go for high concurrency. You get both benefits in just one language.
And before anyone decides to smoke me in the comments, I do understand that Go and Rust are lower level languages whereas Gleam is sort of a mid-level language as it runs on the BEAM Virtual Machine.
However I have seen the great argument that the only way to make a backend that doesn't crash is with something like Rust for ultimate type-safety and protection from memory errors (which isn't foolproof). But after using Gleam for around a month I can say you really don't need Rust for that, Gleam has incredible type safety and the fault tolerance of the Erlang runtime to power it in creating efficient and scalable backend infrastructure.
I mean WhatsApp uses it, it must be good! (this is a joke lol)
With Gleam's recent v1.3 release we now have auto-import for the LSP which is a great assistance to developers, aswell as many more features.
If it wasn't already clear this is a very opinionated post but I really just wanted to share this language and help get others into it because I truly believe this language will help power the future of backend development. Typescript has to die soon right?
So if this post interested you at all please check out Gleam and Isaac's channel because I think he is single-handedly providing the best gleam education currently available.
That's all from me this post, until next time.
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