Elixir: an antidote for concurrency headaches

José Valim didn’t set out to create yet another programming language, but that’s exactly what he ended up doing in his quest to solve a problem he encountered as a programmer: modernizing concurrency. The result is Elixir, a functional language that makes it easy to write concurrent and even distributed, fault-tolerant software – or so it claims.

Six years after its first release, Elixir is starting to make ripples in the software development community. So when Sioux invited Valim to one of its Hot-or-Not sessions last June, the room was packed with programmers – making it, quite literally, a hot session.