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Comment by adenozine | Hacker News Reader

Shot in the wind, but is there a plan for different syntax? For those who've become comfortable in different fp camps, I can't really see myself picking up curly brackets and C-style code again. I really like the idea(s) of this project, but it's the thought of staring at that kind of code that's just a bit too much. I'd rather do something like [Nim,Scala,Clojure,F#]->JS if I needed to have that.

I've always kinda felt that there's a lost opportunity for extensible syntaxes by doing things this way rather than having the main surface of a language be some sort of intermediate representation (A la Wasm, LLVM IR, JVM, et al)

Congrats on the release regardless. It's good to see big stable projects in this niche in the BEAM-verse. The world needs more type safety.

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Unlikely I'm afraid. We used to have an ML style syntax but once we switched to a more mainstream syntax we had a big surge in popularity and interest.

I am very fond of the ML syntax, but I think it is the semantics and type system that really matter, so I am very happy to sacrifice syntax in order to make Gleam more widely accessible.

Is it possible that the popularity increase albeit being correlated to the syntax changes, was not caused by it?

It is possible, but would be an interesting co-incidence. More anecdotal evidence, but Elixir has an easier time with adoption that Erlang and a big part of that reason is syntax.

It's superficial, you get past it quickly, but it's the first thing you encounter and that can affect whether people give a language a 'proper' go.

There certainly were other factors, but people have been quite vocal in their enjoyment of the new syntax.

I think the ML people like me are kinda used to not getting their favourite syntax. Alas!

Thanks for the response!

That's very cool, I wouldn't have thought that the trend would swing that way. I suppose it makes sense in a conventional wisdom kind of way.

How long ago was the switch? I'd like to read (code or prose, idc) about your experiences switching the syntaxes out. That's a hard thing to do right, but maybe not so much if it was really early on?

The big switch was maybe about 3 years ago? v0.5 had a few more changes away from the ML style too https://gleam.run/news/gleam-v0.5-released/

You may prefer alpaca[1] which is in the ML family and on the BEAM. Someone could target Core Erlang [2] or BEAM byte code directly and offer a pluggable frontend for different syntax, Mix would almost allow that. I think it's just a huge lift to make happen and get everything to play nicely with BEAM semantics. But that's just like my opinion.

[1] https://github.com/alpaca-lang/alpaca [2] https://blog.erlang.org/core-erlang-by-example/

Right, I see. I wasn't aware of Alpaca, that's quite cool. I've read a little bit about Elixir and about how it's basically a big box of macros and magic dust that goes down to simple, straight erlang in the end, if I had more time I'd love to dig into their compiler.

Alpaca looks very neat, and ML is right up my alley. thanks again for showing this!

I can admit I am no BEAM expert and it seems my thought offended the experts, but I just like the aesthetic of modularity played out to the logical conclusion of syntactic extensions unto intermediate forms.

Sadly Alpaca development has stopped. One of the reasons I started Gleam is that I was working on the Alpaca standard library and realised that the bugs I was reporting were not getting fixed.

> I can admit I am no BEAM expert and it seems my thought offended the experts

Who knows? I didn't find the musing particularly off putting.

As Alpaca is apparently dead there's also LFE[1] and Hamler[2]. Most devs in the space stick to either Elixir or Erlang so ymmv.

[1] https://github.com/lfe/lfe

[2] https://github.com/hamler-lang/hamler

Purerl is another good one to look at. It's an alternative backend to the PureScript compiler, which is quite a popular language!

That's a good point, I always forget about PureScript.

There's also Caramel https://caramel.run/

That looks like a really interesting thing to potentially combine with rescript/bucklescript.

It’s still super early on but I think this is one of the motives behind Lunatic:

https://github.com/lunatic-solutions/lunatic

This is an absolutely fascinating project. I'll be keeping a close eye on it for sure!

I had hoped that Go would eventually kind of serve this role in the PLT world, years ago when it was first announced. Sadly, it's morphed a lot over the years into something entirely different.

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