My Impressions of Gleam

It’s crazy that we have totally opposite views here.

I find code block which are delineated by brackets so much more readable than ones delineated by invisible characters. Especially at a glance

I don’t love do..end either, but still prefer them to arguing with Python about the level of indenting not being correct or that spaces were used somewhere somehow.

> this can be easily attained in most languages with universal code formatting rules and intelligent code editors that highlight different elements to improve readability.

Ofc, none of this is a practical issue, but that’s what makes it a fun topic of discussion ;)

My biggest issue with tabs over curly braces is that it makes copy / pasting code insanely difficult. That alone makes tabs a bad choice.

Why not both? Approximately no one uses braces without indentation, and that's trivially enforceable with a code formatter. But I personally find that the redundant signal of the braces makes things much more readable than in the languages that lack that redundancy!

Every human communication mechanism includes deliberate redundancy to ensure that the meaning gets through even in suboptimal situations. Programming languages are somewhat unique in having a strong movement towards eliminating all redundancy.

It’s always a fun little, largely meaningless, bike shed. ;)

I don’t understand how people prefer invisible characters which change sized depending on the editor to visible ones which are consistent and easy to scan for.

I can’t agree with that.

Curly bracket blocks are obviously visible at a glance. If I incorrectly move one around it’s obvious.

If I shift tab a section of python code around, I may be breaking an if state without noticing if I didn’t pay attention to a specific colon on one line.

Imo s-expressions are the easiest to move around, but have the same issue of being hard to scan as tabs.

It's easier and quicker to move code around with braces when you're using vim. Vim has motions for selecting, editing, copying, etc everything between two braces. Without the braces, it makes moving that code around much more difficult, and error prone.

i don't mind as long as it's simple and regular (python is ok for instance)

"Get used to it" doesn't mean "like it" or "prefer it".

I've gotten used to a lot of things that I'd rather not have to deal with.

> people just get used to it

it's not just a matter of preference -- "no-curly-brace" dogma means it's impossible to do multiline lambdas in python

Isn’t python currently the most popular programming language?

MINASWAN is a cultural thing, not a code of conduct. It's not enforced by Matz from on high in such heavy-handed ways, it's just the way that the Ruby community rolls.

That said, if this interests you, that's great! Like I said, there's nothing wrong with a project that is primarily political in nature. I'm just highly skeptical that such a project can achieve good technical outcomes in the long run once the admins get accustomed to suppressing negative reactions under a vague "good vibes" policy.

I could be wrong, and that's exactly what political projects are often designed to do: to prove a political point. But if you're not interested in a political project and are instead looking for a strongly typed BEAM language, you might be better off just waiting for Elixir to finish its types.

It stops being funny when you realize the root cause of this posturing is mental health issues. These people are unwell.

As many are fond of saying these days, everything is political, whether it tries to or not. But what makes me say this is a political project more than a technical one is that consistently, as in TFA, the thing people say draws them to Gleam is this statement on the home page.

And again: lpil has explicitly said that they're not stopping with intolerance, they enforce "good vibes". That's what I'm worried about on a practical level: I don't believe you can build a healthy technical community that solves real problems on that foundation.

I very well might be wrong, and I believe that that's the point of this political experiment. But I also think it's important to emphasize that that's what this is: a political experiment, not just a programming language.

Pending definitions of intolerance.

This is an automated message. Your SocialScore has been downgraded 1.75% for using two negations in a single sentence. Please be more positive in the future. Thank you.

Hah, fair enough. Proper citation added.

Okay, replying now to what you actually meant (my other comment assumed that you were saying that Gleam advocates for tolerance, I didn't realize it was a reference to the quote):

I said nothing about quiescence. I said nothing against taking a stand. My opposition is to the idea that the way forward for conflict management is to purge it and pretend it isn't happening. That's what happened in the case I linked to—a member of the community expressed disapproval of admin actions and had their disapproval removed by the moderator and received a rather passive aggressive response in a DM. That's an inappropriate way to moderate that does not lead to healthy conflict management.

Taking a stand would be publicly engaging with the criticism, not purging it and engaging with the critic in a private message.

I'm much less concerned about the US-politics-centric commentary on the main page (though there are problems with that, like making people not in the US feel excluded) than I am with a broader trend in many open source projects (this one being one of several I've seen) of "protecting" their community from anything that remotely resembles toxicity, even when those things are well meaning criticism of the way that things are being run.

And no, I wouldn't say that anything is purely technical—but some things are political in service to the technical, and other things are political first. Gleam strikes me as a project that is firmly political first, based on the lead dev's actions and the community's discussion (this article literally places the project's political stance as "first and foremost"!). As I say, that's not a bad thing, but I'm skeptical that it will work out in the long run on a technical level to prioritize the politics over all else, especially when the approach to politics is one that shuts down conflict rather than cultivating and curating it.

> to draw the line from the need for tolerance in itself to the necessary prescription that quiescence is the only way to be if you want to get things done

I'm not talking about tolerance, I'm talking about the lead dev actively shutting down negative reactions to their comments and justifying it under the banner of "good vibes". If the lead dev can't deal gracefully with criticism, that's going to be a problem.

Too many people in this thread are treating criticism of this pattern of silencing dissent for not "vibing" right as though the critic is implicitly endorsing letting Nazis roam free. There's a middle ground between "good vibes only" and "fascists welcome" that lpil has explicitly said he's not interested in pursuing.

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It’s not for me.

Interesting, my experience is the opposite

These groups still hate. It’s just that Gleam’s creator hates the same people you hate so you’re ok with that.

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Which programming communities don't allow trans people to exist, bombard black people with racism, or have been taken over by Nazis?

> Choosing to "not be political" means choosing to be inclusive to Nazis and to be dangerous for nearly everyone else.

That's a fucked up take. I guess because Gleam doesn't explicitly call out pedophiles, rapists, murderers, and other low-lifes that they must be inclusive of those folks too right? Gleam is so dangerous for everyone else as a result. /s