FLOSS Weekly Episode 860 - Elixir Origin Story
Jan 14, 2026
Jose Valim, the creator of the Elixir programming language and Chief Adoption Officer at Dashbit, shares his journey in developing Elixir. He delves into the importance of immutability for concurrency and the historical significance of the Erlang VM. Valim highlights how Elixir excels in networked systems, real-time applications, and even AI integrations. He also discusses debugging concurrent systems, the role of lightweight processes, and the innovative Tidewave project, which aims to enhance coding with intelligent agent support.
AI Snips
Chapters
Transcript
Episode notes
Immutability Simplifies Concurrency
- Immutability removes many concurrency bugs by eliminating shared mutable state as a mental model.
- Jose Valim says creating new values instead of mutating existing ones makes concurrent reasoning far simpler.
Erlang Solved Today's Problems Long Ago
- Erlang solved concurrency and distribution decades before modern multi-core problems became mainstream.
- Valim found Erlang's VM compelling because it handled both concurrency and horizontal scaling naturally.
Process Isolation And Message Passing
- Elixir programs run as many lightweight VM processes that communicate via asynchronous messages.
- Because processes are isolated, crashes are contained and supervisors can restart failed components safely.