25 October 2019
Languages We Love: Elixir
As web applications become more common, and more users complete daily tasks online rather than having to set foot in a grocery store (for example), business must adapt and are demanding highly performant and reliable systems. It’s good to be in the software space, technology is not going anywhere, we all know it. One of the languages we have spent a lot of time learning is Elixir. You’re picturing a witch standing over a cauldron with a class test tube … right? What can Elixir do, any why would you use it for your custom software needs?
Elixir is a dynamic, functional language designed for building scalable and maintainable applications. It builds on top of a 30 year old language called Erlang - suitable and reliable enough for most telecom networks in the 80’s and 90’s - it will surely handle without a problem the sort of critic systems of today’s internet. Elixir shares the same properties for building distributed, fault-tolerant applications. (Meaning the property that allows a system to continue operating in the event of the failure of some of its components, really important). Elixir was created to be used in web services from the start, and it also provides productive tooling and an extensible design.
For our developers, it’s a joy to use, and makes functional programming much more accessible. The Elixir community is a welcoming group of developers - something you don’t always find when there’s a shiny new language that changes the game for your clients. It’s easy to get help in their forums, or chat about the latest features in a chat room, even attend the conference each year where you’ll find a sea of minds looking to learn and share the endless applications of Elixir with each other. Gaslight has found it encouraging to find a community that has an active involvement in the future of the language. And as for our clients, well, they want a team of developers investing in their project to be on top of the ever-changing world of technology, of course.
