livebook VS gleam

To get started you need a running instance of Livebook

LiveBook site

I prefer functional programming with Livebook[1] for this type of thing. Once you run a cell, it can be published right into a web component as well.

[1] - https://livebook.dev

If you're a coder, Livebook might be worth a look too. I certainly have my eyes on it.

Would highly recommend looking at Jose's use of livebook to answer these. It makes testing easier. It's old but still relevant. Video link inside

That's hard to say. Racket is a rather complete language, as is F# and Elixir. And F# and Racket are extremely capable multi-paradigm languages, supporting basically any paradigm. Elixir is a bit more restricted in terms of its paradigms, but that's a feature oftentimes, and it also makes up for it with its process framework and deep VM support from the BEAM.

I would say that the key difference is that F# and Elixir are backed by industry whereas Racket is primarily backed via academia. Thus, the incentives and goals are more aligned for F# and Elixir to be used in industrial settings.

Also, both F# and Elixir gain a lot from their host VMs in the CLR and BEAM. Overall, F# is the cleanest language of the three, as it is easy to write concise imperative, functional, or OOP code and has easy asynchronous facilities. Elixir supports macros, and although Racket's macro system is far more advanced, I don't think it really provides any measurable utility over Elixir's. I would also say that F# and Elixir's documentation is better than Racket's. Racket has a lot of documentation, but it can be a little terse at times. And Elixir definitely has the most active, vibrant, and complete ecosystem of all three languages, as well as job market.

The last thing is that F# and Elixir have extremely good notebook implementations in Polyglot Notebooks (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-dotne...) and Livebook (https://livebook.dev/), respectively. I would say both of these exceed the standard Python Jupyter notebook, and Racket doesn't have anything like Polyglot Notebooks or Livebook. (As an aside, it's possible for someone to implement a Racket kernel for Polyglot Notebooks, so maybe that's a good side project for me.)

So for me, over time, it has slowly whittled down to F# and Elixir being my two languages that I reach for to handle effectively any project. Racket just doesn't pull me in that direction, and I would say that Racket is a bit too locked to DrRacket. I tried doing some GUI stuff in Racket, and despite it having an already built framework, I have actually found it easier to write my own due to bugs found and the poor performance of Racket Draw.

This looks very similar to LiveBook¹. It is purely Elixir/BEAM based, but is quite polished and seems like a perfect workflow tool that is also able to expose these workflows (simply called livebooks) as web apps that some functional, non-technical person can execute on his/her own.

1: https://livebook.dev/

I haven't had time to really try to write anything in it, but https://gleam.run/ looks really good too. Like Elm for backend + frontend!

Want a friendly language for building safe systems at scale? Gleam is here for you. It features modern and familiar syntax, that's reliable and scalable. Gleam runs on an Erlang virtual machine, and can run plenty of concurrent tasks. It comes with a compiler, build tool, formatter, editor integrations, and package manager all built in so you can get started right away. Congrats to the team on shipping your first major version 🙌.

While I love Clojure, I have to agree about tooling. I recently started using Gleam* and was impressed at how easy it was to get up and running with the CLI tool. I think this is an important part of getting people to adopt a language.

* https://gleam.run/

If you use languages that compile to WASM (such as Gleam https://gleam.run), and can also run Postgres via WASM, then it opens very interesting offline scenarios with codebases which are similar on both the client and the server, for instance.

Recently, Gleam has gained more popularity, and a lot of developers (including me) are learning it. At the time of this writing, it has exceeded 14k stars on GitHub; it grew really fast for the last month.

Oh, strange that github had a date of 2016 on this one: https://github.com/gleam-lang/gleam/issues/2

I was just going by that, though I do remember checking out gleam 5 years ago or so.

Re: macros, I really do think they’re a big deal and all the other newer languages I’ve used, such as Rust have some kind of macros or powerful meta programming features.

For older languages, a few, like Ruby have enough meta programmability to make nice DSLs, but many others don’t. Given the choice, I’d much rather have Elixir/Clojure style macros than other meta-programming facilities I’ve seen so far.

I had been only following this language with some interest, I guess this was born in gitlab not sure if the creator(s) still work there. This is what I'd have wanted golang to be (albeit with GC when you do not have clear lifetimes).

But how would you differentiate yourself from https://gleam.run which can leverage the OTP, I'd be more interested if we can adapt Gleam to graalvm isolates so we can leverage the JVM ecosystem.