I’m curious to see how Elixir’s very recent (still prototypical) type system addition will change the demand for a language like Gleam.
I don’t think that Elixir’s types and Gleam’s have much in common, they will provide very different experience. Coupled with there not being much crossover from the Elixir community to the Gleam one I don’t think it’ll have much impact on Gleam.
First, let me make it clear: I'm not trying to knock Gleam and it's type system—it's really cool what you've done.
> Not much crossover from the Elixir community
Interesting! I didn't know that. For the die-hard ML-style type system fans (of which I am one) Gleam will absolutely be the most attractive thing on the BEAM block. I think there is a small contingent of developers who would really rather have a type system who might choose Gleam, but that Elixir's new type system (when it matures to support user-supplied annotations and whatnot) might suffice. I think it's an interesting case to see how adding a type system might shift people's preferences between two established languages.
That said, again please don't see this as a knock on Gleam or me trying to say "well now Gleam is obsolete"—I'm not trying to say that. I hope Gleam has an illustrious future. :)
Elixir and Gleam are very different languages offering very different things.
But most importantly, Elixir is, and always will be, a gradually typed language. There will always be parts of it that will remain or encourage dynamic typing and that opens the door to ambiguity. In a statically typed language the compiler enforces type annotations and that is where Gleam shines.