It's made of people

When choosing programming languages, “scalable,” “resilient,” and “performant” are often said. Less often heard: “elegant,” “beautiful,” or (my favorite) “human.” In this talk I contend that code is written not for the benefit of computers, but for humans—and that Erlang/Elixir are not only scalable and resilient, but elegant. Join me on a whirlwind tour of tools, frameworks, and practices that make code by and for humans, whether it’s you in 6 months or one of your customers.

OBJECTIVES

I recently had an unsettling conversation with a friend, who tried to convince me that I shouldn’t be so excited about Elixir—that being overly invested in any particular toolset put me in danger of getting passed by in the future when the next awesome technology makes everything I do now irrelevant. I was incredibly bothered. I admit that there will be new technologies invented in the future, and those may eventually supplant our current toolchains. If these eventual new technologies are better for humans and bring people more joy, then that would be a great thing. That would only happen if the creation of these theoretical tools bubbled out of real human needs, and was built to solve human problems. Based on my experience throughout my career, I fear that this will not be the case—that new things will be built, replacing the current ecosystem without bothering to understand that ecosystem or its blind spots. I want more people to talk about these things, so that the next best shiny programming thing might actually be built to make human lives better.

AUDIENCE:

Elixir programmers will hopefully find the talk technically useful, if they want to use linters and static analysis tools haven’t successfully made the jump. Maybe they can point unconvinced coworkers at this talk, and help to convince them. I really want to provide a compelling message for language and framework developers.