José Valim, creator of Elixir: building language from curiosity, not trends | Evil Martians podcast

José Valim discusses the history of Elixir, making technical decisions driven by curiosity, and his work on Tidewave for AI-assisted web development.

José Valim, creator of Elixir: 13 years of Elixir and the future of AI tooling | Evil Martians podcast José Valim, creator of Elixir and founder of Dashbit, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about how following curiosity over market trends led him to build one of the most loved programming languages. He shares why he made technical decisions over adoption-friendly ones, how decentralizing the community let Elixir reach domains he never imagined, and what he's building with Tidewave — higher-level AI tools that understand web frameworks, not just code. Victoria Melnikova is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, and host of Dev Propulsion Labs. She works with 40+ early-stage startups a year as Head of New Business at Evil Martians. x.com/vmelnikova_en Evil Martians is a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups. evilmartians.com/ 00:00 Intro 03:11 Challenges of building a language 06:01 Key decisions that led to great adoption 10:35 The secret to success 12:45 How to make sure the language doesn't get out of control 13:50 How to approach developer marketing 15:16 Dogfooding 16:04 Analytics 19:13 Nurturing new companies 21:36 Fun things in San Francisco 21:59 Building on Elixir 24:18 Current situation in San Francisco 29:21 Future of Tidewave 30:51 Future of AI tooling 33:14 Message to developers 35:03 Warm fuzzy question