José Valim on the Future of the Elixir Ecosystem

Elixir Wizards

Today on Elixir Wizards, José Valim, creator of the Elixir programming language, joins hosts Sundi Myint and Owen Bickford to discuss the future of Elixir, upcoming features, changes to the language and ecosystem, and the potential for a type system.

José discusses how Elixir’s extensibility allows the ecosystem to grow with new tools and libraries, all while requiring few languages to the core language.

Key Takeaways:

• The origin of the famous rainbow heart combo
• José’s hands-off approach to planning the ecosystem which allows community contribution without reliance on the core team
• The success and growth of the Elixir community
• Lessons learned in the first ten years of the language
• The evolution of Elixir's documentation and the role of Livebook in creating more interactive and engaging learning experiences
• The potential for Elixir Nx to make numerical computation, machine learning, and data science more accessible to Elixir developers
• Potential implementation of a gradual type system and the importance of backwards compatibility
• The role of the Elixir community in shaping the language's development and ecosystem, including the importance of open-source contributions
• Whether we’ll see Elixir 2.0 in the next decade

Links mentioned in this episode:

Josė Valim Keynote ElixirConf EU Bringing Elixir to Life
Dashbit - https://dashbit.co/
Elixir programming language: https://elixir-lang.org/
ElixirConf: https://elixirconf.com/
ElixirForum: https://elixirforum.com/
Elixir's Logger library: https://hexdocs.pm/logger/Logger.html
José's Twitter: https://twitter.com/josevalim
ElixirLS (Elixir Language Server) https://github.com/elixir-lsp/elixir-ls
Mermaid Charts in Livebook - https://news.livebook.dev/date/2022/1
IEx - https://hexdocs.pm/iex/1.14/IEx.html
Numerical Elixir - Nx: https://hexdocs.pm/nx/getting-started.html
Nerves: https://hexdocs.pm/nerves/getting-started.html
Membrane: https://hexdocs.pm/membrane/getting-started.html
Dialyxir: https://hexdocs.pm/dialyxir/readme.html
LiveBook: https://hexdocs.pm/livebook/getting-started.html
Bumblebee: https://github.com/elixir-nx/bumblebee

Special Guest: José Valim.