If we’re using LLMs to write code and assist with code reviews, why would we pick any specific programming language?
- Platform support
- Existing libraries
- Immediate performance
- “Language runtime” features
- Correctness enhancing features
Platform support has always been a concern, but is also innately flexible:
- C is the native language on Linux / Unix
- That doesn’t mean all Linux programs are written in C
- Similarly with C / C++ / C# for Windows or C / Swift / whatever for Mac
Some especially interesting languages:
- Rust
- Elixir / Erlang
- Go
- TypeScript
Why specifically Elixir?
- Problem: Telecom Switches
- Reliability
- Redundancy
- Concurrency
- I/O dominates performance
- Internet servers
- Similar problems
- With other uses for concurrency too
- Functional programming
- Immutability
- Pure functions
- Explicit state
- Defined data
- Any “mutation” is creating a new object possibly passed to a recursive call
- Message passing
- Clear concurrency model
- Transparent across several machines
- Soft real-time + processes
- Our problems specifically
- Transient server-side state
- GenServer (a process that holds state and the rules for interacting with it)
- Horizontal scaling
- Supervision trees
Modeling Grange with OTP
