I learned some Gleam a while ago, my familarity with F# helped, but I didn't find a use case for it. Some while ago I wanted to play with raw sockets so I figured, why not Gleam, its binary parsing syntax will be handy so I looked into the erlang sockets module and attempted to write some ffi wrappers for the necessary functions. Turns out it is not as straight forward, especially that the definitions on erlang side are often complex, with many variants and the dynamic nature doesn't often map very well to Gleam. The documentation was also quite sparse for interop. Interop also involves a lot of Dynamic types so encoding/decoding back which is cumbersome. Sooner or later I hit a wall. By virtue of reading Erlang docs to write the ffi wrappers I eventually got familiar with Erlang syntax which at first was quite alien, but turns out it is rather simple with just some rules to remember. I settled on writing Erlang directly. I am not sure how Elixir compares, never tried it, but I was initially put off by the syntax resembling Ruby, which I have fond memories of, but was always very implicit which I didn't like. Writing pure gleam is pretty fun, but a lot of interesting things require either ffi interop or decoders/encoders even for simple things like json which takes away some of that fun.