Builders choosing small, weird languages for personal projects
Two Show HN projects today chose unusual language picks for infrastructure tools. WAL-RUS is in Rust, which is expected. But Armadillo, a DNS server for homelab use, is written in Gleam, a relatively obscure functional language that compiles to Erlang bytecode. The comment thread on Armadillo immediately asked why Gleam, which is the right question, and the answer is essentially 'I wanted to learn it and it fit the use case.' Bashblog, a blog engine in a single bash script, also got attention, appealing to people who want minimal tooling with zero dependencies.
The pattern: builders are making deliberate, sometimes contrarian language choices for personal and side projects, prioritizing learning, ergonomics, or minimalism over ecosystem size. This is not new, but the variety of languages getting serious use in hobbyist infrastructure (Gleam, Rust, Go, bash) is wider than it was five years ago.
Gleam specifically is interesting because it gets Erlang's fault tolerance and concurrency model with a modern type system. For networked services like DNS, that is a reasonable trade, even if the community is tiny.
So what?
The hobbyist infrastructure space is where language ecosystems get tested before they go mainstream. Gleam is worth a look if you are building anything that needs Erlang-style concurrency without the syntax friction. More practically, the 'use something weird to learn it' instinct in side projects is how ecosystems grow, and founders who track these early signals can spot the next Go or Rust before it is obvious.