Tune in May 24, 2022 at 9 a.m. PDT/12 p.m. EDT for 10 Years of Elixir hosted by Adolfo Neto and Gustavo Oliveira.
In the decade since José Valim released the first version of Elixir in 2012, companies as varied as Spotify, Discord, Netflix, and Pinterest have turned to Elixir for its inherent scalability, concurrency, and other benefits.
At DockYard, we have a long history of industry-leading Elixir work, championing Elixir development with open-source projects, and encouraging diversity within the Elixir community. So it’s safe to say that our team has a soft spot for Elixir.
For some, like Senior Software Engineer Chris Houhoulis, the fact that scalable concurrency is a fundamental feature of Elixir sets the language apart. Fellow Senior Software Engineer Zach Liss credits Elixir with making him a better problem solver, and Software Engineer Andrew Berrien praised Elixir’s pattern matching capabilities.
Here are seven more reasons why DockYard engineers love working with Elixir:
1. Nathan Long, Software Engineer
“There are lots of things I enjoy about Elixir: The tooling and documentation are great, and exciting tools like LiveView are setting the agenda for our industry.
But what I appreciate most is the process model. Whereas object-oriented languages tie functions and data together, which is a bit arbitrary, the Erlang VM ties data to a process. This forces modifications to a piece of data to happen serially as that one process executes, even though other processes execute in parallel. So we can happily use concurrency without data races.”
2. Mike Binns, Software Engineer
“Elixir lets me program cleanly without hacking around language limitations. The elegant, simple solution is almost always the best option in Elixir, and Elixir provides many elegant simple language constructs.”
3. Tiago Davi, Senior Elixir Engineer
“Writing code on top of a battle-tested Erlang environment by using a clear and elegant syntax created by a Brazilian, as well as having a fantastic community to support people are two of the reasons why I love Elixir.”
4. Chris Tovar, Engineer
“Elixir has given me the opportunity to build entire systems in a more homogeneous manner before resorting to alternative technologies that are not as performant as the OTP or easy to develop and maintain.”
5. Adam Phillips, Engineering Manager
“The lightweight, built-in concurrency and fault tolerance are good examples of things in Elixir that can grab one’s attention, but I’ve found that I enjoy the development experience as a whole to be most enjoyable.
Pattern matching, piping, even aspects of functional programming I somewhat dreaded (looking at you, recursion) are just a few examples of things I love having available.”
6. Bennie Rosas, Engineer
“Elixir has proved to me that you don’t need JavaScript to build a world-class web application.”
7. Gustavo Mora, Engineer
“Learning Elixir has made me a better developer. I love pattern matching, and the Elixir community rocks!”
