Questions about Property Testing / Stream Data

[josevalim]

Sorry for keeping on adding replies but this is a thread to answer questions after all.

@doomspork

These are valid concerns which I’ve heard from a number of individuals as well as organizations evaluating Elixir, longevity is a concern many of us share.

I definitely have this concern too. What if I am ran over by bus? What if get bored of development a la Office Space?

It is one of the reasons why development and communication is open. If I disappear, hopefully the language goals and ideals have echoed to many developers who will be able to carry the torch.

That’s also why we have a core team and I actively delegate areas of the codebase that I have been the only person to work on to the other team members. In Elixir v1.5 there has been an effort in improving the Elixir compiler internals where I put little work exactly with this concern in mind. Overall the code is well tested and well documented.

And that’s also why I love initiatives like Elixir School and Elixir Forum, because they are run by the community and for the community, without any involvement of the Elixir team.

Finally, It is also one of the reasons why I said many times, including in this thread, that we can only add so much to the language:

@josevalim

We also understand there is a limited amount of features we can add to the language before making the journey too long or the language too big. Adding something now means not including something else later.

A big language does not only fragment the community and makes it harder to learn but it is also harder to maintain. It is also why the language was designed to be extensible: so the community could build what is necessary without a push to make everything part of the language.

This leads me to the next topic.

@doomspork

What brought me to Elixir was the community and what felt like an opportunity to participate in the evolution of the language and the ecosystem on which it depended.

For those who joined Elixir early on, it definitely has become harder and harder to participate in the language evolution. I don’t dispute that. However, I don’t think it is because of lack of communication, which hopefully I showed above is still on going and present, but because of many other factors:

• The language is no longer changing as rapidly so there are fewer opportunities to get involved
• The number of features we are adding to the language is reducing (as it should)
• The changes have become more focused and specialized (which requires more time investment to participate)
• The community growth means the more accessible issues are addressed really fast because there is always someone ready to contribute
• The community growth means discussions develop fast. If you join late, you will need to catch up on a big backlog (which is why I am very vocal about not side-tracking discussions)

When someone asks me how to contribute to Elixir, I always talk about the community and the ecosystem. That’s where the focus should be.