[Video 263] Dave Thomas: Elixir — The Power of Erlang, the Joy of Ruby

Ruby is a programming language that people love to use: It’s extremely flexible and fluid, and completely object-oriented. But the world is moving — to some degree, at least — away from objects, and in favor of functional programming, with shared, immutable data.  Erlang takes this to the extreme, also allowing us to work with any number of processes, with a rock-solid virtual machine. Elixir is a new programming language that tries to marry these two approaches together. It feels like Ruby, but it sits on top of the Erlang virtual machine, providing all of the advantages that it offers. In this talk, Dave Thomas introduces Elixir, and demonstrates how this combination of flexible coding, immutable state, and high levels of concurrency can work together to provide a powerful coding paradigm.

Note that the slides and demonstrations are hard to read for much of this presentation; they’re available at http://gotocon.com/dl/goto-chicago-2014/slides/DaveThomas_ElixirThePowerOfErlangTheJoyOfRuby.pdf.

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