I’m looking for a new programming language to learn this year, and Gleam looks like the most fun. It’s an Elixir-like language that supports static typing.

I read the language tour, and it made sense to me, but I need to build something before I can judge a programming language well.

I’m sharing some notes on my first few hours using Gleam in case they’re helpful to others learning Gleam or to the team developing the language.

I’ve been experimenting a bit with Gleam and Elixir lately as part of my search for a new programming language.

One of Gleam’s flagship features is that it can call Elixir code and libraries, but I couldn’t find any examples of how to do that. I wrote a simple example of calling an Elixir library from a Gleam project, based on my beginner’s understanding of the Gleam/Elixir/Erlang ecosystem.

Install dependencies

For this example, I’m using

Highlights

• The writing techniques I planned last month helped me publish faster and focus better.
• I need to find more ways to talk to readers about my book.

Goal grades

At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals:

Publish two chapters of my book to pre-order readers

• Result: Published “You’re Qualified to Write a Blog Post” and “Good vs. Bad Content Marketing”
• Grade: A

I completed these chapters and sent them to pre-order customers.

One of my goals for the year is to learn a new programming language. It’s been a while since I learned a new language, and I feel like a lot of the languages I know well (Go, Python, C++) are similar to each other, so I want to try getting out of my comfort zone a bit with a language that feels weird to me.

Requirements

Here’s what I’m looking for:

I just finished listening to Simon Willison’s interview on the Software Misadventures podcast. I learned a lot from the interview, so I wrote up my notes.

This is not a summary of the whole interview, just the parts that were new to me or that I’d like to remember.

Who’s Simon Willison?

• One of the co-creators of Django, the most popular web framework for Python.
• One of the most popular indepedent bloggers on Hacker News.
• For the last few years, has focused his blog primarily on AI, especially on applications of AI technology in everyday software development.
• Currently working on an open-source data analysis tool called Datasette.

Plugins as a form of open-source contribution

Original discussion