I love just the ideas in the Erlang system. I've tried to break into it a few times, including once or twice with Gleam, and kept getting blocked by terminology I didn't know and couldn't look up, or instructions that didn't have the intended effect. I became convinced I needed a guide who already knows the system.
That was a few years ago, and looking back I must have been wrong -- but I tried pretty hard. (I successfully learned my way around Haskell and NixOS, which are at least roughly as esoteric, but I thought much better documented. And NicOS isn't even that well documented )
Recently been diving into Nix, elixir, gleam and F#. Heavily agree with you. One benefit of Elixir or Gleam is the friendly syntax and style that makes things easier to digest. That helps me quickly apply things to new situations. Nix is like the complete opposite, I struggle to understand other people's configs unless its super well commented.
Some of that is probably unavoidable as Nix is used by users aiming to solve fundamentally complex problems
Gleam is an interesting gem I have not tried yet but its basically written in Rust and compiles for the BEAM VM and has types, so you get a Rustish looking syntax that builds to BEAM and to my naive eye looks like its using a lot of their libraries and looks really nice.
Its had a lot of polish since the last time I ever looked at it, might have to experiment with it. :)
It’s really great to see some strong contributors alongside Louis :)
I'm only learning Gleam right now but the feature set already feels small, very cohesive and well thought.
Pipelines, function capture, use expression, pattern matching: I wish I could work with this in Python at work :')