What I find very fun about Gleam is its minimalism. You've got functions, types, a case expression, and modules to organize them. That's it. No inheritance, no methods, no ifs, no loops, no early returns, no macros. And yet it's fairly productive and ergonomic to write.

For the most part, Gleam feels like it has gathered the best ideas from some interesting langs (perhaps a chimera of Rust, Go, ML and Lisp) and put them into one coherent, simple language. It's not that the ideas are new, they're just very well organized.

Gleam's labelled arguments are AFAIK a unique feature. (Edit: Nope see comments below) This lets you have named function argument appear differently to the caller than they do internally. The caller may way to refer by verb ("multiply_by") and the function may want to refer to it as a noun ("multiplier").

The `use <- ...` expression and pipeline operator `|>` can reduce boilerplate with nested function calls in a lot of cases. It's a nod to the ergonomic benefits of metaprograming without giving the user a full macro system.

Finally Gleam's tooling is the best in the business, hands down. The entire language, the compiler, package manager, LSP, etc, is all built into a single binary with an ergnomic CLI. Compared that to cobbling together a python environment or pretty much any other language where you need to assemble and install your own piecemeal toolkit to be productive.

Very excited to try Gleam more.