This is a transcript from an interview with the creator of Elixir, Jose Valim by Darko Fabijan at Semaphore, you can visit their website & listen to the interview here: https://semaphoreci.com/blog/elixir-creator-jose-valim In this episode of Semaphore Uncut, José Valim, the creator of the Elixir programming language shares with us insights on developing Elixir, from its inception to the road ahead.
José is the Chief Adoption Officer at Dashbit, speaker, and the author of three technical books.
We talked about:
How Elixir was born
Elixir’s functional roots
The role of Erlang VM
Modeling concurrency in Elixir
The milestones of creating a new programming language
Extensibility as a must
Elixir macros enable the ecosystem
Tips to stay focused
Listen to our entire conversation above, and check out my favorite parts in the episode highlights!
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Edited transcript
Darko (00:02): Hello, and welcome to Semaphore Uncut, a podcast for developers about building great products. Today, I am excited to welcome José Valim. José, thank you so much for joining us.
José: Thanks for having me. I am José Valim, and I believe most people know me as the creator of Elixir. I am also the chief adoption officer at Dashbit. We are a company where we are helping startups and enterprises run and adopt Elixir, in different stages, different industries, and so on.
How Elixir was born
Darko (00:45): Can you give us a bit of history, how you ended up doing what you’re doing and how that progression came to the point where you felt that the world needs a language that will address a certain group of problems?
José: I was a Ruby/Rails developer and at the time, back in 2008, we were starting to hear a lot about concurrency and that machines, they’re going to have multiple cores.
I knew from the experience of maintaining Rails and other root projects that writing multi-core software, which is software that runs on all cores with Ruby, was not really straightforward. So for example, w