[00:00.000 --> 00:07.520]  All right, cool.
[00:07.520 --> 00:09.680]  So again, apologies for being this late.
[00:09.680 --> 00:12.880]  I really don't take it out on the people that are organizing this room.
[00:12.880 --> 00:14.600]  It's really my fault.
[00:14.600 --> 00:17.040]  So I hope still you have a nice day.
[00:17.040 --> 00:20.760]  And I'll try to keep it short, so we stay on schedule.
[00:20.760 --> 00:25.040]  So this is kind of an introductory talk for people that are new to Elixir and Alang.
[00:25.040 --> 00:28.960]  So Elixir is a language which now already exists for 10 years.
[00:28.960 --> 00:32.760]  And it's built on top of the Beam virtual machine, also called the Erlang VM.
[00:32.760 --> 00:37.960]  So it had some of the properties that the Beam runtime has as well.
[00:37.960 --> 00:42.120]  And the Beam runtime is actually created for telecom systems.
[00:42.120 --> 00:45.000]  So it's meant to be 24-7 on.
[00:45.000 --> 00:49.640]  And by doing that, it has to be full torrent, so if something goes wrong, it can still heal
[00:49.640 --> 00:52.640]  and keep on running.
[00:52.640 --> 00:57.320]  And because it has to be on all the time, it also means that any code changes should
[00:57.320 --> 00:58.320]  be done on the fly.
[00:58.320 --> 01:01.800]  All the system is running without interruptions, without bringing systems down, bringing systems
[01:01.800 --> 01:02.800]  up.
[01:02.800 --> 01:07.800]  But just keep things running on and changing the code under the hood.
[01:07.800 --> 01:11.800]  It also needed to be concurrent, because it needed to handle a lot of incoming telephone
[01:11.800 --> 01:14.160]  calls at the same time.
[01:14.160 --> 01:19.120]  And it also needs to be distributed, because you have to connect telephone switches together
[01:19.120 --> 01:23.320]  and make sure that everything runs smoothly.
[01:23.320 --> 01:32.520]  So those are kind of the properties that Erlang also inherited from Erlang as well.
[01:32.520 --> 01:39.640]  So when you look at other systems, multi-threaded, OK, programming can be hard.
[01:39.640 --> 01:44.200]  So in theory, it should all work like we have, you know, if you want to do something concurrently,
[01:44.200 --> 01:47.640]  we spawn a few threads and they do their work.
[01:47.640 --> 01:52.960]  But in practices, because threads can actually interfere with each other's work, it actually
[01:52.960 --> 01:54.240]  becomes a mess.
[01:54.240 --> 01:59.000]  So hence the second picture.
[01:59.000 --> 02:01.640]  The other property that Erlang has is full torrents.
[02:01.640 --> 02:08.000]  So in Erlang, you set up a supervision tree in which a supervisor is actually watching,
[02:08.000 --> 02:09.160]  monitoring, or worker.
[02:09.160 --> 02:13.440]  And if one of those processes dies, then the supervisor actually makes sure that a new
[02:13.440 --> 02:15.920]  process is spawned in its place.
[02:15.920 --> 02:20.240]  And the system as a whole keeps running, even though one of the parts actually fail.
[02:20.240 --> 02:27.920]  And so the mantra that's very often told in Erlang is, let it crash.
[02:27.920 --> 02:31.120]  Nice timing, OK.
[02:31.120 --> 02:35.800]  Because people feel safe by, you know, if there's an exception, if your code always
[02:35.800 --> 02:41.560]  goes for the happy path and something goes wrong, Erlang developers tend to not care
[02:41.560 --> 02:45.960]  that much about it because the system, like the supervisor, will restart that process
[02:45.960 --> 02:47.120]  again.
[02:47.120 --> 02:53.160]  So very exceptional edge cases are sometimes not covered because they feel comfortable
[02:53.160 --> 02:58.800]  having the system pick it up from there as well.
[02:58.800 --> 03:02.960]  Before Alexa came around, Erlang also existed for quite some while.
[03:02.960 --> 03:10.200]  So Alexa also inherited some of the experience of 20 years building telecom systems, which
[03:10.200 --> 03:14.640]  also makes it, for example, WhatsApp had only 57 engineers working for them when they
[03:14.640 --> 03:17.640]  were sold to Facebook.
[03:17.640 --> 03:20.080]  But only about 20 of them were Erlang developers.
[03:20.080 --> 03:26.560]  The rest were actually mobile developers supporting Android, Windows, iOS, et cetera.
[03:26.560 --> 03:33.960]  And they actually could handle a lot of users while having a small team.
[03:33.960 --> 03:39.240]  So then the question also becomes a little bit why does Alexa exist?
[03:39.240 --> 03:42.880]  And when people, like, innovate when they're building new things, there are approximately
[03:42.880 --> 03:46.920]  three things, three ways they can go around it.
[03:46.920 --> 03:52.200]  So they completely build something very new, which didn't exist before.
[03:52.200 --> 03:58.280]  Or they try to combine the ideas from previous, from other fields, for example.
[03:58.280 --> 04:02.680]  Or in some cases, people just put a new label on it and say, well, this is new.
[04:02.680 --> 04:04.760]  This is innovation.
[04:04.760 --> 04:09.640]  So hence the title of my talk is, is Alexa really something new?
[04:09.640 --> 04:16.800]  Or is it just a new label on the existing Erlang foundation?
[04:16.800 --> 04:24.280]  And some other languages, they, you know, they've tried to incrementally do some innovations.
[04:24.280 --> 04:28.320]  But after a while, the original sources picked up those changes.
[04:28.320 --> 04:33.800]  In this, like, CoffeeScript is a very famous example, in which the original language picked
[04:33.800 --> 04:40.680]  up those changes and nowadays a lot less people actually use CoffeeScript.
[04:40.680 --> 04:45.680]  So how we're doing on time, okay.
[04:45.680 --> 04:50.560]  So the question is then also, why did Jose, kind of the creator of Alexa, why did he write
[04:50.560 --> 04:52.480]  a new language?
[04:52.480 --> 04:56.440]  And he was at a time when he wrote, Alexa was working at the Rails team.
[04:56.440 --> 05:02.280]  And one of the things that he faced was trying to make Rails thread safe, so making sure
[05:02.280 --> 05:07.080]  that several threads that were running in the Rails program weren't interfering with
[05:07.080 --> 05:08.080]  each other.
[05:08.080 --> 05:11.920]  And by doing that, he was actually looking around, how did other, like folks, how there
[05:11.920 --> 05:16.400]  are other problems in languages, other frameworks, how did they solve that issue?
[05:16.400 --> 05:19.080]  And that's when he actually stumbled upon Erlang.
[05:19.080 --> 05:20.080]  And he liked it.
[05:20.080 --> 05:25.400]  It was, you know, just the thing he needed to use.
[05:25.400 --> 05:30.000]  But there were also some things that he was actually missing.
[05:30.000 --> 05:35.320]  So for starters, the syntax stems from Prolog.
[05:35.320 --> 05:37.960]  So it's unfamiliar for a lot of people.
[05:37.960 --> 05:42.920]  So that means that new people who come to Erlang have to, you know, have a high barrier
[05:42.920 --> 05:51.280]  to, okay, high barrier to actually get around because they feel unfamiliar with the syntax.
[05:51.280 --> 05:53.560]  So he did that first.
[05:53.560 --> 05:58.120]  And he also introduced other new syntax, for example, the pipe operator in which, like
[05:58.120 --> 06:04.760]  the result of the previous expression, is piped into the next function as a first parameter.
[06:04.760 --> 06:09.760]  So by doing that, you can avoid having a very nested function calls by having something
[06:09.760 --> 06:14.320]  that's more readable, more clear to other people.
[06:14.320 --> 06:22.560]  He also introduced more extensibility to the language by introducing macros and protocols.
[06:22.560 --> 06:24.880]  And one of my favorites is actually the bottom one.
[06:24.880 --> 06:29.720]  I'm not sure if everybody can read it, but it's an upcase function which takes a string
[06:29.720 --> 06:31.960]  and upcases every letter.
[06:31.960 --> 06:34.600]  And it does that under the hood via a macro.
[06:34.600 --> 06:42.120]  So the Unicode definition, like the library definitions of characters is downloaded and
[06:42.120 --> 06:45.720]  actually being translated to functions under the hood.
[06:45.720 --> 06:51.400]  So when you call this, you're actually using, you know, some data that is transformed into
[06:51.400 --> 06:54.840]  functions for the language.
[06:54.840 --> 06:58.200]  I'll skip over this part because we don't have judgment time.
[06:58.200 --> 07:01.440]  And you also actually see that those macros are used everywhere.
[07:01.440 --> 07:08.040]  So even like, you know, defining a module is a macro, defining a function, et cetera.
[07:08.040 --> 07:13.360]  Everything is actually implemented through macros.
[07:13.360 --> 07:17.200]  The other thing that he also introduced is the build tool to make it easier for people
[07:17.200 --> 07:20.880]  who are, for example, new to the language.
[07:20.880 --> 07:25.360]  If you want to have a package manager, like before, didn't really have package management,
[07:25.360 --> 07:32.000]  like in the sense that you could add packages to your project, but you had to download them
[07:32.000 --> 07:36.560]  by yourself, put them somewhere, define it in your config, like, okay, this is the path
[07:36.560 --> 07:39.600]  to my library that I'm using.
[07:39.600 --> 07:46.040]  And with Hex and with Mixed, Alex just made it easier, but, you know, by having a list
[07:46.040 --> 07:51.520]  of dependencies and go download it from a central place.
[07:51.520 --> 07:54.320]  Documentation was also made more prominent.
[07:54.320 --> 07:57.720]  For example, the doc tests, which are inspired by Python.
[07:57.720 --> 08:04.680]  So in this case, we have a function defined, and above it is a document, a comment in which
[08:04.680 --> 08:06.400]  there's an example.
[08:06.400 --> 08:12.800]  And this example doesn't serve only for documentation, but at the same time, it's also tests.
[08:12.800 --> 08:17.240]  So, you know, actually, you can, if you would change the implementation, you can directly
[08:17.240 --> 08:24.080]  see the effect of it because the test is just above it as documentation fails.
[08:24.080 --> 08:32.320]  So, and, yeah, the documentation is also accessible from Rappel, from other places.
[08:32.320 --> 08:34.360]  And this was built before the LSP.
[08:34.360 --> 08:38.640]  So nowadays, you can, you know, just hover over function in your editor, and you will
[08:38.640 --> 08:40.480]  see the documentation.
[08:40.480 --> 08:46.840]  But when Elixir was created, those functionalities weren't that common, like among other languages,
[08:46.840 --> 08:50.080]  and that's something that's really nice to work with.
[08:50.080 --> 08:55.960]  And the last thing that he kind of also introduced is a different culture, a culture which is
[08:55.960 --> 08:58.520]  a little bit more open to newcomers.
[08:58.520 --> 09:04.200]  So it's not like Erlang, you know, shed away from newcomers, but it also didn't, like,
[09:04.200 --> 09:15.000]  make it easier for new people who are new to the language to get started with it, et cetera.
[09:15.000 --> 09:21.360]  So that whole, you know, like, to come back to my question, like, is Elixir in kind of
[09:21.360 --> 09:24.040]  new flavor on top of Erlang?
[09:24.040 --> 09:28.960]  I think there are kind of projects stemming from Elixir which make it more interesting
[09:28.960 --> 09:30.160]  and which are really new.
[09:30.160 --> 09:38.880]  So, for example, NX numerical Elixir is an extension which makes machine learning easy,
[09:38.880 --> 09:42.800]  and that's something that, you know, before Elixir, nobody actually thought would be useful
[09:42.800 --> 09:47.760]  to do with the beam, with the Erlang VM, because it wasn't meant for that.
[09:47.760 --> 09:52.040]  It wasn't meant for numerical, for number crunching.
[09:52.040 --> 09:58.240]  But this library, this tooling actually makes it a lot easier to do, and that's very promising.
[09:58.240 --> 10:03.840]  Phoenix is actually a web framework which was inspired by Rails, and now study arounds.
[10:03.840 --> 10:08.840]  Phoenix is now an inspiration for Rails and other frameworks to work with.
[10:08.840 --> 10:14.880]  And NERVs is also kind of an interesting project which makes it possible to run on smaller
[10:14.880 --> 10:19.160]  devices like Raspberry Pis or something like this.
[10:19.160 --> 10:22.640]  So to answer the question, is Elixir really different from Erlang?
[10:22.640 --> 10:27.040]  Is it really, you know, an innovation or is it rehashing?
[10:27.040 --> 10:28.360]  I would say no.
[10:28.360 --> 10:38.480]  I think Elixir really adds something to the whole ecosystem, which wasn't that easy before that.
[10:38.480 --> 10:48.920]  So with that being said, thanks for listening.
[10:48.920 --> 10:49.920]  Thank you.
[10:49.920 --> 10:54.240]  Unfortunately, we don't have any time for Q&A, but you can find, don't you?
[10:54.240 --> 10:55.240]  Yes.
[10:55.240 --> 10:56.240]  Here.
[10:56.240 --> 11:01.320]  Again, I usually have the handle toxified, so on Twitter, if it still works or mastered
[11:01.320 --> 11:04.120]  on you, you can also find me.
[11:04.120 --> 11:07.680]  And I'll be around, I think, for today if you have any further questions.
[11:07.680 --> 11:11.160]  So thanks again for listening, and apologies for being this late.
[11:11.160 --> 11:12.160]  Thank you again.
[11:12.160 --> 11:13.160]  Thank you.
[11:13.160 --> 11:14.160]  Thank you.
[11:14.160 --> 11:15.160]  Thank you.
[11:15.160 --> 11:16.160]  Thank you.
[11:16.160 --> 11:17.160]  Thank you.
[11:17.160 --> 11:18.160]  Thank you.
[11:18.160 --> 11:19.160]  Thank you.
[11:19.160 --> 11:20.160]  Thank you.
[11:20.160 --> 11:21.160]  Thank you.
[11:21.160 --> 11:22.160]  Thank you.
[11:22.160 --> 11:23.160]  Thank you.
[11:23.160 --> 11:24.160]  Thank you.
[11:24.160 --> 11:25.160]  Thank you.
[11:25.160 --> 11:26.160]  Thank you.