I actually got an email like from an old co-worker after I was fired. It was done much in the vein of the advice in this post. It was short, friendly, and made no pretence about staying in touch. I gave a short, friendly response and that was that. I gotta say I actually really did appreciate it, and still do. Of course, I wasn’t exactly upset about being fired so I don’t know if this counts.

You shouldn't use anything by Google.

i guess you are saying that writers cant take creative freedom in their writing bending the rules to prove a point i dont agree but i do hate it when people do it on forums eschewing punctuation and capital letters which can often cause confusion and worst of all are the people who write one sentence per paragraph though your parentheses save you from that one

Not my experience. Often the single commit is all the context I need. If it's not, follow the merge to the ticket number to get more context.

> Reading and reviewing clean history is really so much nicer.

You can have both with git and it's not even hard. Unfortunately it seems many people pride themselves in what little they know of git. I'm not being sarcastic, I've read people say this almost word-for-word.

git is a means, not an end

commits mean precisely what their author intend them to mean, nothing more

if you squash-merge every PR then history is clean where it matters

To quote my least favourite HN response: "No."

Also replying to echo this. Hate these blanket statements.

Sounds like they are going to consider it a success no matter what.

To add to all these other answers, what would you hope to get out of it without BEAM? Just the syntax?

I like Python, but it's dynamically typed and slow-ish. I like Scala, but I've bumped into the pointy edges of the JVM (e.g.: type erasure) too many times. Rust is great but for most use-cases I am happy compromising with a GC than having to worry about liftimes and ownership and borrows, etc..

Gleam seems like a happy in-between for me, but not knowing much about BEAM and with my negative experiences with the JVM, I had concerns about the overhead.

I don't really have any experience with the JVM other than playing with Clojure. I don't have much to add to the other answers. Two things of note:

- BEAM trades slow CPU in favour of fast IO, so it's not great for number crunching. - While it can be great for CLI utilities, the VM (although very lightweight) does have a noticeable startup time. It's under a second but it's not a good fit for something you would want to run often, ie, if you were building something like git.

As mentioned in other comments, its super power is its concurrency model. I've essentially forgotten what a mutex or semaphore or whatthaveyou is :)

They probably just mean "BEAM language that isn't Erlang."

All BEAM languages always bring something new to the table aside from just syntax (for Gleam it's static type, for Elixir it's macros and, well, mix!) but none of them try and abstract away the core tenants of the BEAM being functional working with modules and processes. So ya, in that sense you could say it's like Elixir.

> has the added benefit of not being X

Just call it Twitter.