Failing to Introduce Elixir

Speaker:
John Darrington


Abstract:

We always seem to have talks targeted towards success stories in pushing Elixir - but rarely seem to talk about the failed attempts to adopt it. In this talk I explore Idaho National Lab’s attempt to adopt Elixir and highlight the benefits we saw, the negatives we experienced, and what ultimately killed its adoption. While this sounds negative - it’s a talk that focuses a lot on social frameworks and how groups work together and failures of leadership, not a failure of the language.

Key Takeaways:

  • General positives of Elixir’s use in scientific computing and scientific environments
  • General methods for adopting new languages/paradigms in existing organizations
  • Warts of the language in a collaborative environment and how to overcome them
  • How leadership should function in order to make adoption of a new language/paradigm successful

Target Audience:

  • This talk should appeal to a broad audience. We talk about technical implementation details for scientific and AI computing, and round out with social structure and leadership aspects of pursuing change in an organization.

Level: Intermediate

Tags: adoption, scientific-computing, leadership