I recently used Gleam + Lustre for a small app that I normally would have built with Elm + PostgREST. It went very well, and I'm now planning to use it for a larger rewrite (of a rails app).
Ruby is lovely. I just prefer static (inferred) types, functional, compiled, and performant languages with managed side effects these days. Bit more upfront effort, but saves a ton of time and stress in the long run.
I've considered playing around with it. Every now and then I tell myself I'm gonna learn front end dev, but as soon as I start looking at it (FE in general not Lustre specifically) I get depressed and give up lol
I far prefer it to javascript or typescript. I recommend using a coding agent to help you learn it (claude code, gemini cli, codex) if you're interested. Pick a smallish project, prompt your way through it, examining to structure and code as you go, asking the agent to explain anything you don't understand.
Probably the most underrated aspect of this new AI age is having a tutor with encyclopedic knowledge available at all times.
* To be clear, I'm not saying to "Vibe Code" it. Take the time to really understand the code, ask questions, and eventually suggest improvements.
I'm confident I can learn it, but the whole ecosystem drives me nuts. It's always a bunch of shit spread across a ton of small file, at least three different "languages" between JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, frameworks or other languages compiled to JavaScript on top of that. Plus the behavior of web browser and trying to wrangle that nonsense.
No disrespect to FE devs. Pretty much all software development is one type of mess or another. But backend and terminals are the kind of mess that make sense to me.
Also, agree that LLMs are actually great for learning if you use them carefully.
> No disrespect to FE devs. Pretty much all software development is one type of mess or another. But backend and terminals are the kind of mess that make sense to me.
This is part of the appeal of Lustre and Elm to me. Not the main thing, but being able to avoid JS land churn (and nulls) is quite nice.
