Episode 151 feat. Dave Thomas and Brian Mitchell - The Future of Elixir

Elixir Talk

# Episode 151 – Dave Thomas & Brian Mitchell In this special episode of ElixirTalk we are joined by Dave Thomas and Brian Mitchell where we continue a discussion that we had at EMPEX NYC this year as a fishbowl style format. If you haven’t yet seen the talk, you can do so here: https://youtu.be/pcbNT1iKebc –– probably best if you watch before listening, but you can also listen to this as a standalone episode. This episode is long, but is packed with some great tidbits about Elixir and Erlang and we go into considerable depth about how applications work today as well as outlining a vision for the future. ## Key moments in the episode - Dave lays out some of the key tenants of his argument about augmenting OTP to work better for a world that we’re in today - Brian describes what OTP is and gives his thoughts on Dave’s initial thesis, questioning some of the static nature that Dave argues about OTP - Dave lays out that what we’re doing in Elixir and Phoenix land is the OTP way (for better or for worse) and questions whether this is the best way to do things? - We talk at length about configuration and how things work today in Elixir / Erlang. Brian does a great job of explaining the different tenants of configuration in OTP that exist and we dig into what a dynamic model might look like. - We then talk about supervisors as they work in OTP and describe the concept of dynamic lifecycle management and a future vision of supervision that goes beyond just processes and extends into system observability. - We discuss challenging conceived wisdom and why that helps move communities forward, looking at the interesting case of how Elixir inherits decisions from the Erlang community and how we might revisit some of those assumptions. ## Links for this show - Dave and Brian’s discussion at EMPEX NYC: https://youtu.be/pcbNT1iKebc - Dave Thomas on Twitter: https://twitter.com/pragdave - Brian Mitchell on Twitter: https://twitter.com/strmpnk - Partisan: https://github.com/lasp-lang/partisan - Chris Meiklejohn’s talk on Partisan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrwhOkiifQ8 - ERLEF: https://erlef.org