Creating and Evolving Elixir (with José Valim) 

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?
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Support Developer Voices on Patreon: / developervoices
Support Developer Voices on RU-vid: / @developervoices
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: • Livebook & Elixir: Whe...
Comparing Elixir & Erlang Variables: dashbit.co/blog/comparing-eli...
Gleam on the BEAM: • Is Gleam your next pro...
José on Github: github.com/josevalim
Kris on Mastodon: mastodon.social/@krisajenkins
Kris on LinkedIn: / krisjenkins
Kris on Twitter: / krisajenkins
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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