Gleam is cool. I wrote some services with it to see if I wanted to use it for more projects. It seemed like a good option because it would be easy to teach.

Things I like:

• fast build times (I only tested small apps though, under 2000 LOC)
• strong static types
• runs on the BEAM
• easy to learn
• pattern matching
• immutable + structural sharing
• currying (with parameter holes)

Things I don’t like:

• no re-exports
• it’s possible to have name collisions between packages; authors have a gentleman’s agreement to always create a top-level module with the same name as the package
• some standard library APIs seem missing or immature (it’s still pre-1.0)
• it can be hard to get good performance out of idiomatic code for specific tasks (see immutability)
• no format strings; best you can do is "Hello, " <> name. It starts to get cumbersome
• parsing/serialization is all quite manual boilerplate; there’s nothing quite like serde
• no field/argument punning
• no method syntax; you just have to scan the docs to figure out what functions can be used with a given type
• you can’t define the same variant name twice in the same module; I believe this is a limitation in how the types are translated to Erlang records
• you can’t call functions in pattern matching if guards
• you can’t have dependency cycles between modules in the same package
• hard to write FFI correctly; you lose all the comfort of types

I think it would help narrow things down if you described what kind of website you want to build.

They explicitly said they want to build a website. Not that you can’t go far with a Java server + HTML(X) but JS is the de facto standard for interactive websites.

Javascript

WASM

Perhaps “domain modules” if you want to be more agnostic about the actual shape of the code.

Stealing from “Domain Driven Design”, I think calling them “domain objects” is appropriate.

What the hell am I looking at.

I’ve been using NixOS for almost a year. The learning curve is aggressive and the learning resources are not exactly friendly to beginners. I’d even say the tooling is poorly designed or at least seemingly redundant at times. You sorta have to grind through it. It was painful for me too, but I feel like I mostly get what I’m doing now.

If you’re interested in diving deep, I suggest trying to write a Nix derivation for some software you use that isn’t already available on NixPkgs. That was a good learning experience for me.

+1 to the people saying to start off using flakes for everything.

Ah that explains it.

Are you kidding me? Clap has some of the best documentation of any crate.

I know it’s not for everyone, but creating your own nix derivation for software that doesn’t exist yet on nixpikgs is not terribly difficult (for most things).

Damn, the author sure knows how to ramble. No wonder they can’t make a game with Rust, they’re too busy talking about making a game.

If you’re going to actually give a useful critique, organize your thoughts into a succinct narrative instead of making a giant list of rambling bullet points.

Are you responding to my comment or just speaking stream of consciousness?

So… dev blames skill issues on language? Classic.

EDIT: For the record, I’m not saying the author is bad at Rust. I’m saying they’re bad at making games and balancing tradeoffs. They keep saying that they don’t like rust because they just want to worry about making a game, not fighting the language. And yet, they seem to continually make decisions that favor performance over ergonomics. Then they whine about how the Rust community is supposedly pressuring them to make bad decisions.

I don’t understand how Agile became synonymous with “useless meetings.” I thought the whole point of Agile was to minimize wasted work.

I don’t think my company uses batch scripts anywhere, but if they did, it would probably be in the app installer for Windows or something.

I assume this means that standard library locking primitives will not be usable in the kernel? What about atomic intrinsics?

It might not be a fad, but it’s definitely a local maximum and/or a limitation that many devs seem to be stuck with.

Strongly agree with everything in this. And wouldn’t you know, it’s written very well!

Is it prohibitively expensive to manually define your data types? How many do you have?

I do not generally recommend using ORMs, but this advice is likely dependent on the particular ecosystem you are dealing with.

It seems like you are pretty deep into Microsoft/.NET territory. I don’t have any experience with .NET so I might not be the best person to help.