January 13, 2026
A gleam of hope—or just more typing?
The Gleam Programming Language
Fans say it’s clean and fast; skeptics say ‘let it crash’ and no more busywork
TLDR: Gleam promises a friendly, type-safe language on the Erlang engine with built-in tools and JS support. The community splits between fans of safety and clean syntax, and skeptics who balk at manual serialization and argue Erlang’s “let it crash” culture is enough, with Advent of Code fueling curiosity.
Gleam rolls in promising friendly types, speedy performance on the Erlang engine (the thing powering WhatsApp), and one-click tooling. But the comments lit up like a code editor at 2 a.m. Rapnie is already swooning, calling it “tempting to delve in deeper,” while brandonpollack2 drops a reality check: he refuses to “hand implement serialization” in 2026. Translation: turning data into JSON by hand is a dealbreaker, even if there’s an editor button (that’s LSP—Language Server Protocol—helping your IDE do tricks).
Then tombert strolls in with the spicy classic: Erlang’s “let it crash” philosophy already works. Cue a mini culture clash—type monks vs. crash cowboys. Lxdlam pokes the TypeScript bear, warning that bolt-on types can devolve into as any chaos, yet still gives Gleam props for its clean, welcoming syntax. Meanwhile, Advent of Code gets name-dropped like a dev Olympics, with azhenley linking a Gleam writeup here.
The vibe: half the crowd loves the safety, tidy errors, and “it just works” tooling; the other half side-eyes extra busywork and wonders if types are a band-aid. Jokes fly about a “JSON sweatshop” and “green threads” being tiny gremlins doing your chores. Friendly language, fiery thread—classic internet.
Key Points
- •Gleam is a type-safe, functional language that runs on the Erlang VM (BEAM) and can compile to JavaScript.
- •The BEAM runtime provides actor-based concurrency, immutable data structures, and a concurrent GC for high scalability.
- •Gleam includes integrated tooling: compiler, build tool, formatter, editor integrations, and a package manager.
- •Interop is supported with Erlang and Elixir; Gleam can use packages from the broader BEAM ecosystem.
- •Gleam generates TypeScript definitions for JavaScript targets and provides clear, practical error messages with no nulls or exceptions.