this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2025
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Specifically, I'm interested in BEAM, but I'm not sure if I should go for Elixir or Gleam. What seems cool about Gleam is that it has static typing.

I have no experience with functional programming at all btw

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[–] AsimovIV@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 4 days ago

Elixir is quite amazing to write and read, the major libraries (Pheonix, Ecto, etc.) have excellent documentation, the tools are generally excellent and it is built on to BEAM which is amazing. But it is a dynamically typed language with all the pain that can incur. Of course, there are tools (such as Dialyzer) to give some amount of static type checking but they were not very good when I tried them some years ago. Using things that need mutation can also be a pain. Programming Elixir 1.6 Functional |> Concurrent |> Pragmatic |> Fun was the book I used to learn functional programming and Elixir and it served me well.

There are other good languages you can look into such as Ocaml (that has good free resources for new programmers) and Racket with the amazing free course you can find on OSSU.