I’ve spent much of my free time (if there is such a thing) over the past few years researching various esoteric programming languages for no reason whatsoever. Some of my favourites include Rescript and Gleam, which target the Javascript and Erlang ecosystems, respectively. But I’ve really been looking for something a little more native. It seems to me that there is a big gap on the language spectrum, somewhere between Rust and Go:

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UPDATE: I’ve updated the Inko Formula on Homebrew to 0.11.0, so you may just want to use brew install inko instead. That said, There are a few bugfixes on Inko that didn’t make it to the 0.11.0 release, so you may want to build off the main branch instead. I have a blog article in progress about why I’m super excited about the Inko Programming Language. It’s nowhere near completion, however, and I wanted to share how I got the latest version Inko running on MacOS (Ventura).

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Throughout my career, I’ve at least tried most of the available programming editors. More than two decades ago, I heard about the vi-vs-emacs debate, and made a pact with myself to use both for at least a year before deciding which I preferred. I started with vim, switched to emacs after a year, and decided I preferred vim. I joined the sublime-text bandwagon for a year or two in the early 2010s, switched back to vim in the middle of the decade, and eventually did the big switch to vscode.

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Introduction This is the sixth in a series of articles exploring the Gleam programming language. In this one, I’m setting aside my little password cracking project to look at gleam for frontend development. I love Rescript for frontend development, it’s a very practical functional programming language, and I’ve written a lot on the topic. So this article will also be a bit of a comparison of Gleam and Rescript. This isn’t really a fair comparison as Rescript is a mature language, and Gleam’s Javascript support is super brand new.

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Introduction This is the fifth in a series of articles exploring the Gleam programming language. In the most recent article, we started exploring how Gleam interfaces with ERLang’s powerful OTP concurrency framework to brute force some passwords. However, it was suboptimal, partially because I didn’t know what I was doing, and partially because I didn’t have time to go into some of the deeper details. I also had a super valuable tip from the Gleam discussion group that I wanted to go into.

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Introduction This is the fourth in a series of articles exploring the Gleam programming language. The first article explored some of the most basic features of Gleam; just enough to say hello. The second discussed looping constructs, namely that gleam doesn’t have them. The third was supposed to be about parallel programming and OTP, but it ended up being more about looping and recursion. So this one is about parallel programming and OTP.

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Introduction This is the third in a series of articles exploring the Gleam programming language. The first article explored some of the most basic features of Gleam; just enough to say hello. The second discussed looping constructs, namely that gleam doesn’t have them. This one was supposed to investigate how Gleam integrates with Erlang’s famous OTP library for concurrency and fault tolerance. But I got sidetracked and ended up doing a second article on recursion and tail recursion instead.

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Dusty Phillips

Canadian author and software developer.

Author and software developer

New Brunswick, Canada