What do you think the (more distant) future holds for Elixir?

I believe elixir will be used in multi-agent systems in drones.

Would be great for the future of drone logistics with respect to delivering goods or more crucial payloads like medications.

Elixir will become sentient and overthrow all the world’s governments. A few humans will be kept alive to enter prompts into chat gpt to generate elixir code.

The year is 2024. Millions of agents can communicate with messages and spawn anywhere at any time. They are overseen by a hypervisor.

Some developers find out all we can think of is the BEAM instead of us programming for the BEAM.

Then a developer using NeoVim decides not to drink any more Elixir but instead swallow a pill. This starts his mission to rescue us…

It’s 2047 and Erlang 187 is released. It features cluster control, in which nodes can form freeform subclusters using access policies. This greatly reduces the risk of “one breached, all breached”.

The BEAM is the defacto standard for communication between everything. Drones, Frigo’s and even ancient cars (some manufacturers still produce cars for nostalgic reasons).

Elixirforum is no more as everyone knows Elixir and you can openly talk about it everywhere as everyone understands you. It didn’t happen everywhere overnight, but typically gradually.

• Rust is no more. A Rustian wrote a thesis about automatic garbage collection and how it makes development so much easier. The hype was real and they found a new hypetrain to jump on. Rust in peace.
• Use of Typescript declined. Not sure why, but a small creature didn’t care and mumbled Not Problem Mine.
• People think Erlang is an offspring of Elixir. They are shocks this is not so as if you tell them Torn from Nathalie Imbruglia is a cover.
• Python is now known to be a popular game in which you have to swallow pixels to grow.
• Other languages shined for a moment but their momentum disappeared along with X and Twitch.
• PHP is upcoming. Its 21st rewrite made it a compiled, fully functional, heavy garbage collected language. It’s even more forgiving than PHP 4 and functions arguments are randomly shifted between minor version to keep everyone sharp. Who ever knew it would survive after PHP 17-20 were skipped! This new version is inspired by a thesis and draws many developers who lost their battles with a strict compiler.
• Go did years ago what is promised us from the beginnen. We have no idea where it went.
• an Elisp flavor of Elixir is shipped in Emacs so you don’t need the BEAM on a system. Just (let them be)
• NeoNeoNeoVim sees light of day. Its config is written in COBOL for good reasons you can find (…gotta find them somewhere…). Very promising.
• Java copied everything from the BEAM. Async, agents, supervisors. As a result, you can run any Java program on the BEAM. With unlimited inheritance of course.

Drones is a great one! And since Erlang processes are super light-weight, I wonder whether at some point Erlang and Elixir could be utilised in tiny/micro drones?

From the horse’s mouth…

^{That made me chuckle, given I know something you don’t}

Some of my thoughts:

Quantum computing could be screaming out for Erlang - (even more) light-weight processes being able to communicate instantly through quantum entanglement?

I wonder if we’ll see more specialised hardware too - I mean, why not? Apple are reportedly working on new silicon for AI (cloud) servers and we already have @peerst making GRiSP for running the Erlang VM on bare-metal (which also supports Nerves, btw). Could we start seeing more specialised hardware for languages such as Elixir/Erlang? (Though you could also argue we already have specialised hardware - the more cpu cores the more suited they are! )

In other areas, I imagine Erlang/Elixir could see the same kind of performance gains we witnessed with Java, I guess it’s kinda inevitable. And programming will, perhaps also inevitably, become easier too - maybe through conscious decisions by the core teams of Erlang/Elixir to begin with, and then through various AI-type tools.

So many possibilities and so many different directions the Erlang/Elixir core teams could pursue. When I first got into Elixir I never expected it make strides in ML/AI - who knows which exciting paths they’ll take us down next..

Let’s hope it includes a (blessed) component library for LiveView

QC with Erlang and BNT (bionanotech), and Machine learning sounds promising.

Don’t forget:

• All LLMs have been revealed to actually be single Elixir modules with trillions of overrides of predict()/2