I’ve read about the widely referenced examples of Erlang/Elixir being used for applications like Whatsapp, Pinterest, Bleacher Report, and of course the uses for web applications. I wanted to see if there are interesting examples of use cases closer to the way the JVM is used in Matlab, as a host environment for an interactive computing environment sort of desktop application. Another example of the type of use case in an open source setting might be something like ImageJ.

The type of applications that I’ve used (in case this is useful as context), are ones like Maya, Houdini (for VFX simulation work, and image/signal processing), and Nuke (compositing), which are C++ applications that include Python for user-level scripting and UI customization, and then an assortment of other things like shading languages or user-customizable nodes for the DAGs that form the basis of the processing. (In the past, some VFX applications kind of used Tcl/Tk as a base, and I always found that kind of interesting, in the sense of non-lisp, lisp-like languages for applications that require significant user-level customization.)

Anyway, my interest had been heading in the direction of setups that might be in use or in development for working with “digital twin” kind of arrangement, but Livebooks look really interesting as an interactive, natively collaborative computing environment that could be adapted to different use cases. So I was wondering about prior art wrt that type of use case.