In this talk we’ll explore the Web community’s steady adoption of functional programming practices over the past few years, and take a look at a new language – Gleam – that promises a simple but powerful alternative to TypeScript and the myriad libraries that accompany it. Gleam compiles to both JavaScript and Erlang, providing a single language that can be used across the stack whilst leveraging both the expansive JavaScript ecosystem and a battle-tested massively concurrent runtime in the BEAM virtual machine. During the talk we will walk through the development of a simple real-time chat application to showcase the language.

Attendees should be familiar with modern Web development trends, but don’t need to know anything about functional programming, Gleam, or Erlang to get something out of this talk. Although Gleam provides many nice things, the ideas presented here are transferable and these practices can be applied to any language or stack.