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Comment by dxxvi | Hacker News Reader

It seems to me that Scala has all the features that Gleam has. And they both run in VM's. Scala is not very popular and Gleam is less popular that that. Someone must really love learning a new language to learn Gleam. I respect it very much.

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Scala is known for being multi-paradigm and quite complex, with competing factions promoting different Best Ways of Doing Things. Gleam is designed to be small and simple with a single clear path for getting things done. Apart from that, Gleam leans heavily on Erlang's actor model, which IMO is one of the greatest successes of language design to date.

> Scala is ... quite complex Do you mean the Scala language is complex or the Scala libraries (not the Scala API) that people created (e.g. Cats, Akka ...) are complex? If you say that the Scala language is complex, could you give an example?

> Erlang's actor model ... is one of the greatest successes of language design to date IMO, if you work within 1 VM, the thread model is closest to us as almost all languages have it. How many languages the actor model is implemented in? I know Erlang, Scala. What else?

Scala doesn’t have Erlang’s BEAM VM?

It runs on the jvm

I worked with Scala professionally once and agree it’s very similar. Honestly what put me off Scala the most were the atrocious compile times, it was like working with big complex C++ projects in that respect. Sorry but my time is more valuable than that.

Compile times, lots of backwards compatibility breaking, and the forced functional everything from the community even though it was designed to be a blend of OO and FP.

Gleam compiles very fast - I believe the language has been designed in part to enable this. No context-dependent grammar, etc.

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