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