Gleam Gathering 2026 | Hacker News Reader

Gleam Gathering 2026

gleamgathering.com

62 pointscrowdhailer28 comments

Funny timing. I literally just started poking around with Gleam last night. Got it installed, I think I have the LSP set up, though I wasn't really seeing much autocomplete in nvim. Either way, I'm already pretty excited about it. I love functional languages, I like fast languages, and I like them statically typed. Gleam seems to check all those boxes, so I'm looking forward to digging in more.

What is Gleam? page could really use a definition.

Edit: On review, it seems the best description of Gleam is in the bio for the one of the presenters (which doesn't really say much about them). Apparently it's a programming language.

https://gleam.run/

Maybe not every web page has to explain everything all the time?

A page advertising an event published to a very general forum would see more success if it explained the core reason for the event

If you don't already know what Gleam is, why would you want to attend a Gleam conference?

It could be used as an opportunity to be educated on a language that you previously knew nothing about.

Sorry, but the target audience isn’t the very general forum of HN, it’s folks who likely know Gleam (given it’s a Gleam conference). Should they have a small explainer link? Maybe, but I don’t think they need to go in depth about it and a link to the language page is enough.

A link to the language page would've been great, but it's not on the event page...

Please note that the person who posted this announcement to HN is the event's organizer. Thus it seems reasonable to conclude that "the very general forum of HN" is part of the event's target audience.

I think it's a relevant question. Other than the minimal mention that it's a programming language, there's not even a link to the main site.

This one should. The whole point of announcements is to cast a wide net in hopes of catching people who are new to the scene, and those new folks shouldn't be expected to already know the scene's lingo.

It seems to be an Erlang-like language. The gleam.run site linked below refers to BEAM languages, which I haven’t heard of before.

I’ve read the entire front page. I don’t know more than that. A wonderful example of people who already know the answer writing the text. They really need a concise explanation. That said, they did very well in their explanation of benefits - the other part of a landing page - and I’d be keen to learn more.

From the conference page:

> the Gleam programming language, a friendly language for building type-safe systems that scale! It runs on the Erlang virtual machine, as well as on JavaScript runtimes.

And that sounds really intriguing. But nowhere does it explain why or how it is ‘friendly’. Erlang has a mystique and I suspect there’s a really solid niche here they’ve found.

For info on Gleam... https://gleam.run/

Agree, the conference page doesn't explain Gleam at all. Perhaps they expect everyone interested in a Gleam conference to know what Gleam is. A reasonable expectation, I'd say.

It’s a very nicely designed language that can run on BEAM or compile to JavaScript. I played around with it a while back and loved it, but I don’t have any projects that align with its niche, so I basically forgot about it. That said, it hits all the right notes if you want a simple functional language with great type support, pattern matching, etc, with minimal syntax to learn.

Honestly good question. Second time Gleam marketing has showed up on front page in a few days. I’m pretty well plugged in to the state of the industry and never heard of it.

Was super surprised to see this #1 on the front page just now. Really makes you wonder.

Sorry but I have heard a lot about Gleam for at least one year. Since they had a 1.0 release and ThePrimeTime [0] Youtube channel featured it (it has 175k views as of writing, for a new programming language video that's like a number 1 hit). They are being backed by fly.io and have an impressive number of sponsors[1].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mfO821E7sE

[1] https://gleam.run/sponsor/

> I’m pretty well plugged in to the state of the industry and never heard of it.

Which industry?

Either way, I'm not sure whether Gleam is used much by "the industry".

Isn’t that my point?

Maybe so. And then you're overrating "the industry". The industry is full of people making bad technological choices...

It’s a functional programming language that runs on the BEAM and has Rust inspired features and syntax.

It's a language that runs on top of Erlang VM (called BEAM), similar how Clojure or Scala reuse Java VM. There are other languages that use Erlang VM, like Elixir or LFE.

Gleam is interesting because it's the first statically typed language for Erlang VM, other languages for it can have gradual typing and type hints (TypeScript-style), but under the hood they are still dynamic.

The team behind it cares about adoption so they try to do many things around the language right: they have a compiler, a package manager, a code formatter, an LSP server. So, while the developer experience may seem somewhat rough you still get a feeling of maturity. Gleam doesn't feel like someone's experiment or a toy, but rather like a language that will be around and actively developed for decades.

It's really a joyful language. Kind off rusty minus the borrow-checker and the mutability. In it's core it's just pattern-matching and functions/closures as first class citizens. The ecosystem is young and you have to search a bit to find the right tools for the job or the gleam way to do things. I tried it because you can use the same language for Front- and Backend it's biggest Frontend lib called "Lustre" is hyped to be the Elm successor. Anyways gleaming away for 2-3 weeks now and it's the best DX that I ever had - no Beam experience upfront btw.

Dumb question but how is a language rusty without a Borrow Checker? For me it feels like that would be the primary point of being "Rusty".

I guess it's the typing and syntax that feels like writing simple Rust, even though the semantics aren't that similar when you look closer.

It's actually right there on the front page "Hello! I’m Louis, the creator of the Gleam programming language, a friendly language for building type-safe systems that scale!"

If anyone like me is wondering why clicking "buy tickets" just goes to the call for papers, disable your adblock.

tl;dr - New(ish?) erlang-y language

Almost a decade old now, only 4 years younger than Elixir.

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