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Comment by adenozine | Hacker News Reader

Have you seen gleam.run? It’s pretty neat.

I preferred the alpha syntax, which was ML-inspired, but it’s decent in its current incarnation.

I’ve always though the beam was really nice for building programming languages, and clearly that is true, as there are now more than a dozen targeting it.

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Thank you for this! I love elixir and Erlang but I hate elixir’s syntax, so Gleam looks really cool!

Are you aware of other beam-targeting languages?

Have I got a link for you!

https://github.com/llaisdy/beam_languages

See you down the rabbit hole!

I will put in a good word for PureScript for the beam with `purerl`. It's my go-to for writing BEAM code nowadays. Notably PureScript tooling including LSP, package management, etc., just works, so you are able to just get to work in internalizing the way OTP and other Erlangy things are expressed in a statically typed, pure language with much better facilities for functional code than any other BEAM language.

https://github.com/purerl/purerl & https://purerl-cookbook.readthedocs.io/ for more information. Join the PureScript discord and the #purerl channel if you want help.

What sort of things do you write with it? You don’t use it professionally do you?

I'm writing proof-of-concept applications in it for our company currently. Our core technology is Erlang (and Elixir), so the jump isn't comparatively as ridiculous as a Java shop suddenly writing PureScript on the BEAM. I trust code written in PureScript far more than I do code written in Elixir and there are already at least 2 companies using `purerl` in production with the majority of their code in PureScript.

With that said, I've been writing Elixir since 2015 and have worked with Erlang & Elixir since a couple of years after that (+ Haskell), so I'm both much more likely to use niche languages and I'm also well versed in using the BEAM. PureScript with `purerl` actually matches Erlang much better than Elixir does, since Elixir spends half the language and standard library trying to not be Erlang, so I find that it's a better match than Elixir even as a citizen of the BEAM, and the type safety is something I've wanted on the BEAM since I first wrote production BEAM code.

All in all I've been blown away by how solid `purerl` is. The runtime is Erlang, the language is excellent; it's what I dreamed about Haskell being but couldn't quite get.

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