I was delighted to sit down with Jose Valim, the creator of Elixir, earlier this month at Erlang Factory. He and Dave Thomas had just given a brave keynote exploring the barriers that keep people from taking advantage of Erlang’s many superpowers, challenging the audience with reminders that a programming environment must have reach as well as power to change the world.
Elixir itself is a bold effort to bring Erlang’s strengths to a broader group of developers, adding new strengths, notably metaprogramming, along the way.
Watching Elixir grow has been a unique experience for me. I’ve seen other languages (JavaScript and XSLT) emerge, but Elixir combines solid foundations on prior (Erlang) work with a remarkably open conversation about how to structure the language. Jose tries things and asks for feedback, takes suggestions well, and values questions about how best to make the language accessible. Even without a standards organization, the process has remained open, stable, and productive.
Whether you’re interested in Elixir itself or just in the challenges of creating a new combination in a world filled with past experiments, it’s well worth listening to Jose Valim.
- We’ve had functional programming since 1959 – why the burst of interest now? [2:10]
- Moving from Ruby to Erlang “making Rails thread-safe, that was my personal pain-point” [3:13]
- “Every time I got to study more about the VM, the tooling and everything it provides, my mind gets blown.” [6:12]
- Why Elixir started, and how it’s changed as Jose learned more. [10:08]
- Integrating new Erlang features (R17 maps) into Elixir. [15:43]
- When can you use Elixir in production? [18:07]
I’m looking forward to seeing a lot more Elixir, even as I need to catch up on updating Introducing Elixir. I’m not sure it will conquer the world immediately, but it will certainly leave its mark.