Anyone have some interesting things they've built with Gleam?
Since all of my free time programming nowadays is in Gleam, I hope to have better examples for you in the future. :)
[0] https://git.ahlcode.fi/nicd/elektrofoni
An AI tourguide which presents the nearest geotagged Wikipedia pages to the user's location and then produces an entertaining summary of your chosen topic on request. It's just a simple mashup of Wikipedia, MaxBox and OpenAI APIs.
A "leaving the house" dashboard for my wife. It's displayed on a tablet near her mirror, and shows weather and live public transport information to reduce the "I missed the bus and I didn't realize it's raining" disasters that get her day off to a bad start.
I've had a lot of fun making these with Gleam. It has the "if it compiles, it usually works" factor that people love about Rust, with none of the complicated borrow-checking rules. It's very simple - once you're up and running, there's not a lot more to learn about the language and you can just focus on modelling your problem.
If you write JavaScript like it’s Java and really lean into OO, then Elixir will be more alien and force you to learn some new patterns.
The only major difference between them is the typing and the syntax I'd say.
If I were to try to make the argument for you, I'd point to some of Elixir's more powerful abstractions like protocols and macros as a reason Elixir might be harder for JS devs. In reality, though, I found it very straightforward to learn as a JS dev, and that was back in 2016 when the documentation was much worse.