Creating and Evolving Elixir (with José Valim)

José Valim discusses the history, design choices, and future evolution of the Elixir programming language.

Back in 2012, José Valim started building Elixir to as a way to have his ideal programming language running on the same platform as Erlang. Fast-forward 12 years and it’s become build anything from distributed infrastructure to notebooks and websites. In this week’s Developer Voices, José joins us to tell the history of Elixir in a series of design choices. Which features mattered to him in the early days, and which ones excite him most now. What’s going on under the hood to make Elixir tick, and what does its future hold? – Support Developer Voices on Patreon: patreon.com/DeveloperVoices Support Developer Voices on YouTube: youtube.com/@DeveloperVoices/join Elixir Homepage: elixir-lang.org/ Elixir Docs: elixir-lang.org/docs.html Numerical Elixir: github.com/elixir-nx Phoenix: phoenixframework.org/ Livebook: livebook.dev/ José’s Livebook & Elixir Presentation: youtube.com/watch?v=pas9WdWIBHs Comparing Elixir & Erlang Variables: dashbit.co/blog/comparing-elixir-and-erlang-variables Gleam on the BEAM: youtu.be/RntfkL8lUY4 José on Github: github.com/josevalim Kris on Mastodon: mastodon.social/@krisajenkins Kris on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/krisjenkins/ Kris on Twitter: twitter.com/krisajenkins -- 0:00 Intro 2:58 Elixir’s Origins 17:41 How Does Elixir’s Polymorphism Work? 28:30 Login in Polymorphic Dispatch? 33:50 Balancing Power and Safety 39:56 Elixir’s Compilation Strategy 48:16 What Made Elixir Hard to Create? 53:53 What Work is Happening on Elixir Today? 1:00:48 Adding a Type Checker to Elixir 1:29:55 The State of Elixir in 2024 1:39:44 Outro