Episode Description
In this episode, I talk to Giacomo Cavalieri, a core Gleam team member. We cover what makes Gleam special and why developers love it, and how it brings modern type safety to the battle-tested Erlang ecosystem. How did Gleam become Stack Overflow's 2nd most admired language in such a short time? Listen to the episode and find out!
Topics Covered
- Gleam's design philosophy of simplicity and the "one way of doing things" approach
- Statically typed functional programming with the Hindley-Milner type system
- How Gleam targets the BEAM VM and JavaScript for full-stack development
- The history of BEAM and OTP
- Who uses Gleam in production
- The Lustre framework for building web applications in Gleam
- Integrating Gleam with OTP
- How Gleam made it to 2nd Most Admired Language in the Stack Overflow 2025 Survey
- How to speak at conferences
- Why Gleam deliberately excludes type classes and traits
- The future of Gleam
Links
- Gleam.run
- Gleam Language Tour
- Gleam Roadmap
- Gleam Case Studies
- Giacomo Cavalieri's Website
- Giacomo's Func Prog Conference Talk
- Giacomo's GitHub
- Giacomo's BlueSky
- Giacomo's Twitch
- Lustre Web Framework
- Gleam OTP Library
- Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2025
- Func Prog Conference
- Code BEAM Europe
- GOTO Copenhagen
- Lambda Days Conference
- Strand Case Study
- Uncover
- The Zen of Python (PEP 20)
- Paul Graham's Blub Paradox