Fun, functional, and teachable?
Can Elixir bring functional programming to a much wider audience?
Three antique medicine bottles. (source: Deepestbluesea via Wikimedia Commons)
I was delighted to talk with Dave Thomas, co-founder of the The Pragmatic Programmers and author of their in-progress Programming Elixir. I’m writing Introducing Elixir for O’Reilly, and we both seem to be enjoying the progress of the language.
I caught up with Dave last month at Erlang Factory, right after he’d delivered a remarkable keynote challenging the Erlang Community to remove barriers to adoption with Jose Valim. (I also interviewed Jose, the creator of Elixir.)
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Apart from the sheer joy of writing about this topic, in a community that’s eager to get things right, we talked about:
- How “not knowing anything about publishing was a strength in this particular case.” [4:25]
- “pretty clear that as we move to the future, we’re going to be living in a multi-core, distributed, concurrent – all the buzzwords – world. The conventional models we’ve been doing, the OO stuff we’ve been doing, is not going to survive in that kind of environment. [7:17]
- The search for a functional language that enables teaching [8:34]
- “I went back to the room, downloaded the latest Elixir, and was still playing with it until two in the morning… that’s the feeling I had when I started with Ruby.” [10:10]
- “Why try to replace Erlang?” [12:50]
- Working with Jose Valim and the community to fix issues [13:50]
- “picture of a language that is approachable and easy yet incredibly powerful.” [15:28]
- Writing about moving targets – Elixir moves less than Rails, with fewer bumps. [18:57]
- “Elixir is a gateway drug into the functional world… and has things that go beyond what many functional languages give you.” [20:06]
I share Dave’s excitement about Elixir, and fear that it’s set a high bar for my enjoyment of other languages.