Hello, fellow geeks! Allow me to share some new interesting articles from last month. This time we have a new functional language being officially welcomed to the programming community, Java is evolving before our eyes with upgrades to the Streams API, and, of course, I can’t shake off my bias toward Scala, so let’s see what it can offer in the frontend development space as well as find out what commitment it’s received from governing bodies. Happy reading!

Gleam Version 1

I mentioned the Gleam programming language in our newsletter a few months ago. Now I’d like to share the exciting news that Gleam has reached version 1.0 and is therefore ready for production.

Gleam is a functional and statically typed language that runs on top of BEAM VM and has access to the Erlang ecosystem. The syntax is close to the ML family languages, which makes it easy to give it a spin! We’ll be watching this space to see if it gets the predicted traction.

Deriving the Elm Architecture

I don’t usually list any frontend-related articles, but I also suspect I may not be the only one who looks for purely functional frontend development solutions. If so, one of these is Elm architecture, which is baked into the Elm language. It has received considerable interest from those who don’t want to develop their apps in Typescript or Javascript. This article is an introduction to this clean architecture, while presenting its adoption in the ScalaJS library called Tyrian. If I were to pick my favorite frontend stack that also works nicely with my Scala backend, this would be my top candidate.

Stream Gatherers in Practice, Part 1

Java Streams API is receiving a big upgrade in the form of Stream Gatherers, which will, for example, allow stateful operations while processing a stream of elements. This article provides a sneak peek into the feature and gives examples for possible use cases. Is this going to steal some of the applications from Akka Streams? Having it built into the standards library definitely makes for a reasonable argument to say yes...

Scala 3 Roadmap for 2024

Scala received a lot of criticism in the past for being too academic and not addressing industry needs. This feedback was heard, and now Virtus Labs, together with Scala Center, wants to be open about how and why it’s investing in tooling and developer experience, providing stability, and maintaining older versions. If you’re interested, have a look at the roadmap in the article. Would you consider these goals to be more important than language evolution too?