Toby Pfieffer

I don't want to start a flame war, although somebody told me that's good for viewership.

Alexis King

I would recommend Scalab, but yeah, I'm uh I'm Alexis King and I work on GHC, Haskell Compiler.

Conor

Special guest, Jose Valim. He is the creator of the Elixir language.

José Valim

Allegedly. Allegedly. Allegedly.

Conor

What does that mean?

Andor Pénzes

Who knows?

Kim Huizing

Uh it's a panakota and the sauce I think is passion fruit.

Andor Pénzes

I'm interested in type theory dependent types, functional programming in general. I would like to create programs which works.

Conor

I like to create programs that works. That's a quote.

Peer Stritzinger

Well maybe that'll be the cold open right there. If you like Ruby Syntax more, use Elixir. If you like Prolog Syntax more, you don't care about Syntax, use the Alang.

Conor

I'm always so worried whenever I finish this and I'm gonna look down and it's not gonna be recording. Welcome to ADSP the podcast, episode 133, recorded on June 6, 2023. My name is Connor, and on today's episode, we interview attendees and speakers from the Lambda Days 2023 conference that took place on June 5th to June 6th in Krakow, Poland. We interview in this episode Toby Pfeiffer, Kim Kraising, Alexis King, Jose Valim, Andor Penz, and Pierre Stritzinger. This is part one of a two-part episode. Alright. We are here live. First time we're ever doing a live interview on ADSP the podcast. We're here with Toby Pfeiffer. Toby, I mean I know where you're from and what communities you operate in, but the people do not. Introduce yourself briefly.

Toby Pfieffer

Hi, my name is Toby. I'm from Berlin and Germany. I'm mostly active in the Elixir community. I'm use I'm known for Benchyder, which is like the benchmarking library, and otherwise operate in the Ruby community a lot. I maintain SimpleCove, which is a code coverage library, and I run the Ruby User Group in Berlin for like almost 11 years. And so yeah, that's why I do.

Conor

So you went from Ruby to Elixir. Why why the switch? Should people should everyone in Ruby switch to Elixir? Although you still operate in both communities. Yeah, start start a flameware if you want. Go for it.

Toby Pfieffer

So Rails and especially ActiveRecord has a lot of this magic going on with all of those callbacks going back and forth, back and forth, and so it's so hard to figure out where a buck is. And like I saw Alex here and like the function programming paradigm and also the way that they designed, for instance, their database layer, Ecto, as being much more explicit about what happened. So like in Ecto, you gotta go and you actually have a repo instance, and then every time you make a query to the database, you actually gotta go to the repo and be like, repo, do this thing. And so it's very explicit like where SQL queries happen and all of that. And I just enjoyed that and the architecture and the thinking, you know, much more plus. Ruby is still not great at you know parallel programming. Like Ruby has now guilds and whatnot, but like you know, it's the year of like twenty 2023, right? And you know, Alexier and Erlang, like the actor model is just so great, and I always wanted to work with the actor model, and like Alexir gave me that nice way into it that's not as hardcore as Erlang. It's like a little bit of Ruby, a little bit of like the Ruby abstractions, let's say, but I can still use the full power uh of the Beam VM, which I'm very happy about.

Conor

I just realized too, Jose Valim is standing like three feet behind you. We'll we'll talk to Jose in a sec. So we're we're here at Lambda Days 2023. It's a functional programming conference, first time I've been here, but it uh I talked to you. Sounds like you you're a speaker this year, sounds like you spoke in the past. How many times have you been to Lambda Days before?

Toby Pfieffer

Exactly. Uh like I mean in total two times, this year and the last time that I spoke, which is like four years ago or something, I think, uh, where I talked about uh Benchy. But it's uh it's a great conference, and what I love about it is that you know all of the different languages go together uh here because sometimes I say, you know, I've been to so many Ruby conferences, I've been to quite a bit of LX conferences, and at some point some of the topics repeat or they have overlap or they're almost the same. But then it's so cool for me to go watch like a Haskell talk or go watch a closure talk and see like how does this community think, what are they thinking about, how do they operate. So, for instance, one thing that I've also heard you say yesterday is that you know, from the closure community I learned to focus on data, you know, it's all about data, and that changed the way I think about programming. And so I love going out there and like taking bits and pieces of like from other communities to change the way that I think about programming.

Conor

Yeah, absolutely. And you just finished giving, literally 10 minutes ago, uh your talk that you just presented. Tell us the title. I was there, it was fantastic, but uh you know, this is a podcast, so folks folks aren't gonna be listening to it during this podcast, but we'll leave a link when it goes online. What can people expect from the talk you just gave?

Toby Pfieffer

Thank you very much. So the talk is titled Stories in Open Source, and it goes basically goes through my story in open source, like how I started out in open source and was very frustrating, and it talks about why was it frustrating, what was bad, and then how I finally got into open source, what worked for me, and sort of like all the benefits I took from that, but also what I learned about like open source project management, or like also just in general working with people and tries to tell the story and give people a good piece of knowledge and advice so that they can either sort of like maintain their open source projects better, contribute to open source projects, or like essentially also whatever other other sort of like volunteer work they do just have a better time doing it.

Conor

Yeah, it was an awesome talk. Can definitely recommend. I mean, there's so many highlights, you know, you really talk about personal stuff and it's uh it's a different kind of talk. One of my favorite points that you made though is that uh you know people mistake your sort of expertise in the beam, which is the VM that for those that don't know that uh you know languages like Elixir and Erlang run on, uh, they figured, oh, like you must have been an expert before you started building Benchy. Anyways, I'll let you finish the rest, because that was one of my favorite parts. It's like that that's a great learning lesson for folks that are, you know, want to get to that level, but think, oh, it's you know, I'm not an expert.

Toby Pfieffer

So yeah, essentially people you know come up and say, oh, you need to know you need to have known all of this about it. And like it's like, no, no, no. The uh relationship is inverse. I didn't know anything about it, but I started writing this benchmarking library, and in order to write it and write it well, I needed to learn about the BMBM, and that's why I became so good at knowing it. So that's both you know how time measurements work, how processes and memory measurement work. So for instance, there's a very fun story where like we tried to introduce memory measurements in uh Benchy, so like see like how much memory consumption does this one function take, uh, data run take, basically. And it took us months to figure it out because we needed to realize that the Beam VM uses generational garbage collection and like where do they hide the values and stuff. And if you're interested in that, uh my co-maintainer Devin Esther actually gave a very great talk about that very many times about like how memory measurement works in a beam. And that was just the result of us you know doing that work and figuring that out, and so it's uh very fun. So, like, yeah, if you want to learn something, you know, go work on it. You don't need to know it to work on it, you work on it and then you get better at it and you become an expert, maybe.

Conor

Awesome. Perfect piece of advice to end on. And we will link in the show notes the talk that you just mentioned that Devin gave if folks want to go watch that, and as well, we'll link your talk once it comes online. Thanks for being interviewed. Thank you very much, Connor. All right, we've now migrated to the lunchroom. We're here with Kim Housing.

Kim Huizing

Close enough.

Conor

Close enough?

Kim Huizing

Kim Housing.

Conor

Kim Housing. You work at IMG Arena and you're here as an attendee. Tell us how's the conference been? It's day two of the two-day conference. How's it been? Favorite talks?

Kim Huizing

It's been great. It's been great. It's very uh technical, very theoretical, which I love. Uh lots of great people, lots of great talks. Uh yeah, good vibes. And I guess, well, yours was clearly one of my favorites about combinators. Very, very interesting. Uh yeah.

Conor

Tell us a little bit about yourself. Where are you from? Uh what languages do you use day to day? And if you want, tell us a little bit what you do for work.

Kim Huizing

Yeah, uh, so I'm a Scala developer with IMG Arena. Uh I have five years' experience as a Scala developer, before which I did various other things. Uh and at IMG I work in Scala and I also do like uh random tasks. Uh I have a passion for RegX and AWK. And I do a bit of infrastructure. Uh yeah, just various things to keep busy. But yeah, Scala is my bread and butter though.

Conor

If you had to recommend people between checking out Scala or AK, you know, and and what do you what do you love about AK? Why is that one of your uh your personal passions?

Kim Huizing

Uh because it's super, super fast and it combines like some of my favorite things, which are words and logic.

Conor

So what's what's better, Scala or AK? If you only had to choose one or if you had to recommend folks to go check out a language, which one do you recommend?

Kim Huizing

I would recommend Scala because you can do everything with Scala. You cannot do everything with AUG, but yeah, for certain things, uh it can be really good, and especially if you want to do like some uh data manipulation in the cloud or something, it's just it's a very good choice.

Conor

Awesome. And is this is this your first time attending Lambda Days or have you been here before?

Kim Huizing

Uh it's my first time here, yeah.

Conor

You think you'll be back?

Kim Huizing

I think I will.

Conor

Awesome. Thanks for being on the podcast.

Kim Huizing

All right, thank you.

Conor

We are here with Alexis King, closing keynote of day one of Lambda Days 2023. Introduce yourself, because most of the listeners probably operate in the system space, so some people know who you are, uh, even though you're very well known in the Haskell community. So introduce sort of where you're from, what you're working on, and maybe we'll talk a bit about the keynote that you gave yesterday, which was awesome by the way.

Alexis King

Uh wow, you're just I I feel like I'm talking to a news reporter. Um but yeah, I'm uh I'm Alexis King. I work for a company called Twee at the moment, and I work on GHC, Haskell Compiler, and currently I've been working on improving the compile time performance of GHC, but I've also in the past, which I was speaking on today, was uh delimited continuations, added delimited continuations to the GHC RTS, which is exciting. Um of course it probably doesn't mean very much to most people because delimited continuations are a mystery to most people, but that's the whole reason I gave this talk. So if you're interested, you can watch the talk.

Conor

The talk was absolutely phenomenal. We'll talk about how beautiful the slides were in a second, but give people maybe I'm not even sure is it possible to give like a 30-second overview of what people can expect from this amazing delimited continuations talk, because not only was it beautiful, but I think it's probably going to be the most approachable talk. Not that there's been too many talks given on delimited continuations, but what can maybe a 30-second high level as best you can, because I it's a it's a hairy topic to try and summarize in a little podcast bite.

Alexis King

Yeah, so I mean I think really the uh sort of core concept that delimited continuations are really about is this ability to suspend and then later resume computations. And the sort of discussion of exactly how that happens is complicated, but the talk goes into the detail and sort of um perhaps at times painfully exquisite detail about exactly how that happens. But the interesting thing about it is that you can use them to implement all these common types of weird fancy control operators that show up in programming languages like generators, coroutines, exceptions, and that's really what they're about.

Conor

Awesome. So we will link your keynote. I'm not actually sure. I think if I remember correctly, the Lambda Days 2022 talks, they took a few months to come out. I think it was four to six months. So unfortunately, folks are listening to this in the middle of June.

Alexis King

Um actually I will be giving the talk again in about a week at Zurihac, and I think the Zuri Hack talks, they they normally get get them up pretty quickly, so maybe you can link that one.

Conor

Okay, awesome. Also, too, I didn't know Zuri Hack. That's z Z or Z, depending on what country you're in. URI, so like the first four letters of Zurich, and then hack H A C. I didn't even know this existed, and I'm a pretty prolific talk watcher. Tell us a little bit what is Zuri Hack, how come I didn't know about it, and what people what can people expect from uh this kind of conference? It's free, right?

Alexis King

Uh it is free. So it how how do you know that that it's free if you didn't know about it?

Conor

I found out this morning from Meow, hope you're listening, Meow. Uh I'm not actually sure I'm pronouncing that exactly correct, but Meow said, it's a shame you're not going to Zuri Hack because you've flown all the way over here from Toronto, Canada. And then it was in that moment that I realized I'm actually flying to Zurich on Sunday, and I'm taking a week off for vacation and I'm gonna be in Switzerland for a week, the first two days of which, Sunday and Monday, I will be in Zurich. So serendipitously, and I was like, how do is it too late to sign up? And he said it's free. So that is that's how I know it's free. So maybe I'll see you at Zuri Hack. Uh but yes, I have no idea what the conference is about. I learned about it yesterday and I learned that it was free this morning. So uh tell the listeners what they can expect from the conference.

Alexis King

Alright, yeah, so I mean it's it's sort of a hybrid. There's there's people give some talks, but then there's also like a hackathon component, which is the hack part of Zuri Hack. And normally people, I mean, it's pretty casual. I actually have never been in person. I spoke at it three years ago, which was uh when I signed up, it was going to be in person, but then something happened. Um so so I didn't, so I'm excited to be there. But my understanding is that it's normally pretty chill. People will just kind of propose some projects. You can pitch in if you want, you can do your own thing, just chat with people. I'll probably honestly spend a lot of the time just talking to people, but it should be fun. And there's also a few people presenting, um, obviously myself included. And yeah, it should just be a pleasant time.

Conor

Lastly, maybe I'll ask, you've given a ton of talks in the past at a plethora of conferences, many of them, you know, highly, highly regarded on the in the interwebs. Uh is there a place people can sort of find all of your talks or if they want to follow you on socials, like what's the best way to sort of follow the latest and greatest from Alexis King?

Alexis King

Uh that's a good question. I mean the answer to is there a place that you can find all my talks is no. But if you are interested in following me, the I have a blog which is uh Lexi L Exi-lambda.github.io. And also I'm on Twitter, which is just L E X I underscore lambda, um, because they don't allow dashes in Twitter usernames. So that's the main place that I I I post most updates. The the blog, honestly, I haven't written a blog post in two years. Uh hopefully that will change soon. But but there are some things there. People people seem to like the ones that have written in the past, so if you're interested, it's available.

Conor

Awesome. We will link all of that stuff in the description. Maybe I will compile a list of Alexis's greatest hits and put it in a playlist and link it in the show notes. Thanks for being on that podcast, Alexis. Thank you. We're back because we didn't we didn't even talk about how beautiful your slides were. We got carried away with the other content. Tell people quickly what had first tell people how many slides. This was an hour, hour-long keynote. Tell me tell people how many slides you had and then how you made them because extremely beautiful, and I was halfway through the talk flabbergasted. I was like, there's no way that this was manually created. Something's going on here.

Alexis King

So I think, I mean, if you count every individual step of every slide, there's about 300 distinct steps. If you only count, you know, truly distinct slides, it's 60 slides, which is still a decent number, you know, it's one a minute, so I think that's that's still pretty decent, pretty pretty respectable. But uh they're all generated. Racket, uh, the programming language, has a library called hashlang slideshow. I mean, I guess it's sort of a language, but really it's just an embedded domain-specific language for making slides. And there's just sort of um, there's some primitives for making different types of vector graphics, and then you can compose them together with some combinators, and it's very nice. And I mean the truth is if you just use that library, you can get some decent stuff, but then I've also over the years accumulated a set of uh kind of additional library functions to compose things together. So I'm able to just sort of say, here, I want to have this slide and have these things here, and then I just want to draw an arrow between these two things, and it'll just stick it there. And so that's um pretty pleasant. And I guess the most fun fact, because I was giving a talk on delimited continuations, and my library for staging slides uses delimited continuations internally. So, you know, it's just a uh a fun meta aspect.

Conor

A fun tidbit of information. So if you're not interested in learning about delimited continuations, but you are interested in how to make beautiful slides, go check out the talk that's linked in the description. It uses hashlang slideshow from the racket language. It's a Lisp. We all love Lisp's. Once again, thanks for being on the pod. Thank you. This is gonna be uh this is gonna be fantastic. Alright, we're here once again with another guest, this time, special guest, Jose Valem. If you don't know, he is the creator of the Elixir language.

José Valim

Allegedly. Allegedly. Allegedly.

Conor

What does that mean? Who knows? Who knows? Alright, so allegedly the creator of the Elixir programming language. You're gonna be speaking, I think, not in the next time slot, but two time slot from now, about Livebook, I think.

José Valim

Livebook, yeah.

Conor

And so maybe give us a little preview of your talk and then tell us how the conference has been so far. And if you want, you know, tell us what's I'm asking too many questions. Let's start with uh, you know, a preview of your talk and how the conference has been going.

José Valim

Yeah, so my talk's going to be about Livebook, which is uh in a way we want it to be like the next generation of open source computational notebooks. So then there's the follow-up question, which is what are computational notebooks? And computational notebooks it's a tool that allows you to have code, documentation, and rich visualizations, uh all living side by side. And my talk is about both I want to talk about both how Lifebook works and it's implemented, but all the different kinds of things and ideas that you can learn once you put documentation, code, and rich visualizations all together.

Conor

That sounds amazing. I mean I've spoiler alert, I've I've heard you on Thinking Elixir. I think you did like a five back-to-back sort of series, which was amazing. So I've heard a lot of this stuff, but we will link this talk when it comes out online if folks haven't heard about this. It's amazing stuff. I've also seen your keynote that I believe happened in the pandemic where you launched an X. So I mean there's so much exciting stuff. Like, what is the 30,000-foot view of all the exciting stuff that's happening in Elixir in the past couple years?

José Valim

So um for it it's it's kind of hard to answer the question because there are so I like to say that so one of my recent talks was uh called My Future with Elixir, because I wanted well, I am the creator of the language and I am aware that what I think for Elixir is going to impact a lot of people, but I also want everybody in the community, everybody in the community they also have their relation with the language and what is their future and what they expect. So I'm always very wary of like trying to answer about Elixir because I wish that is not an individual answer, but a collective answer. Like a lot of people want something and want and they are going to have their different uh 10,000 uh fit view version. So my version is the things that I've been excited about is uh machine learning bringing a lot of the machine learning ideas into Elixir. Uh so uh today that's one of the things I'm going to show in my talk, like how quickly you can have like speech to text a machine learning model running Livebook with Elixir, and then you can get that, bring it to a web application, and deploy it to production. So that's one. But also related to Livebook, I'm also thinking a lot about uh improving the whole developer experience and the user experience of the language, and then the other thing like of what is happening with Elixir that I am working on is we are exploring bringing a type system to Elixir, but there are a lot of questions like do we want to do it, do we not want to do it? And if we do it, what does that mean? But that's kind of like a summary of everything that is happening and from my point of view and my the point of view of what I'm excited about. But if you ask somebody else, they're going to have like their own things that are excited about Phoenix or Membrane uh happening in the Elixir community.

Conor

Awesome. I will link all of the things plus the talk that you mentioned, it was the future of Elixir in the show notes if folks want to go watch it. I know this isn't your first lambda days. How many times have you been before and and what makes uh this year special?

José Valim

Yeah, I actually I'm not sure how many times I have been here because I uh so the event is in Krakow and I live super close to Krakow, like uh 20 minutes by train. So um so I think I was here in the I may be like the most frequent speaker, but citation needed. Uh we did not check that yet because I'm super close and then I sometimes they invite me, sometimes I invite myself. I like hey, I have this idea, can I come and present? And uh when for some reason I had nothing to speak about, uh they would invite me to come and attend and just hang out, which is super cool. So so yeah, and and uh I'm really happy that uh it's like the 10 years of Lambda Days, and it's really interesting because it's also like last year was also 10 years of Elixir. So it's all like so close to each other and like uh um you know related and about the same age in in certain ways.

Conor

That is awesome. I had no idea. So maybe potentially, you know, we won't say it too loud, but maybe this is secretly like you know an elixir conf conf. You know, I know they talk about other languages, but but really they started at the same time. There seems seems to be something there.

José Valim

Yeah, no, I think uh yeah, uh I I I think I don't think Elixir is the majority being represent represented here, but I think that's great. And it's one of the reasons why I'm frequently speaking here and I try to calm every year is exactly because it's a diverse hub.

Conor

So we're talking to Barbara later. We will ask Barbara what the favor she's one of the organizers or the organizer of the conference. We'll ask her what what her favorite laying is, and I'll be surprised if she doesn't say elixir, so we'll we'll see what she says. Uh last thing, if people want to follow you or the Elixir language, what's the the best place or best spot to go to to check out, sort of follow you and follow the language?

José Valim

Well, I am uh Weirdly on Twitter. And yeah, I think actually I'm not sure. Well, if do follow Elixir, so uh it is on Twitter. We have the Elixir forum, we have a Slack and a bunch of community places where people can join and participate. And I think that's more important than following me. So do that.

Conor

Awesome. We will end it here. Thank you so much for being on the podcast, Jose.

José Valim

Yeah, my pleasure.

Conor

She's back for more. Dessert, yes. Oh, yeah, that's right. We're gonna get dessert. We're gonna get dessert after this, maybe. Is that the only dessert?

Kim Huizing

Uh there's also some vegan cake.

Conor

Sounds vegan. Sounds vegan. Um this is a good one. What yeah, what what kind of dessert we got here? Walk us through this, Kim. Kim's back and she's got a dessert. She's got a rubber duck. Or is that your rubber duck, Andor? No. We're gonna rub it. It's uh that's Kim's rubber duck. So tell us where you got the rubber duck and tell us uh what you're what you're snacking on.

Kim Huizing

Uh I got the rubber duck from Evolution Engineering. They have a lot of good merch.

Conor

And they're they're a sponsor of the conference. Look at that. You sponsor a conference, you might end up on the pod, and they're handing out rubber ducks. We love that. And uh what are you eating dessert-wise? What do we got here?

Kim Huizing

Uh it's a panakota, and the sauce I think is passion fruit. Uh and there's some fresh fruit. It looks delicious.

Conor

Like if you would let me eat it, I could take a bite and we'll do a we'll do a live uh feedback on uh dessert lunch day two. She's nodding her head, thumbs up. We'll wait for her to finish a bite and then we'll we'll get some uh verbalization of uh how it was.

Kim Huizing

It was good. It was excellent. Four out of five.

Conor

Four out of five stars. You heard it here first. Dessert, not the vegan cake, but the panicata. Alright, we're here with our next interviewee. Another speaker, Andor, spoke yesterday about dependent types. We'll talk about your talk in a sec. First, introduce yourself, where you're from, where you're working from, and uh we'll go from there.

Andor Pénzes

Okay. Hi, uh my my name is Andor, and originally I'm from Hungary. I work in uh I work for Standard Chartered. I live in Nottingham. I'm interested in type theory, dependent types, functional programming in general. I would like to create programs which works.

Conor

I like to create programs that works. That's uh that's a quote. Well maybe that'll be the cold open right there. So uh tell us a bit uh at your job, what what language are you operating in, uh, what's your daily driver, and then we'll talk a bit about your your talk.

Andor Pénzes

Um my daily job is a Haskell job. I uh basically send that chart that has a very specialized Haskell team, and I'm part of that.

Conor

Awesome. So Haskell, being used in the wild, absolutely love that. Haskell, one of my top five favorite programming languages. You gave a talk yesterday on dependent titles. Uh we will link that in the description for folks that want to go check it out. Uh give us a little overview of what you talked about.

Andor Pénzes

Um dependent types are kind of easy interesting and easy concept, but we are kind of uh demonizing them, saying that oh these are these are hard because if if GET C type level programming is hard, then dependent type programming must be harder. And my hobby is actually to try to reach a consensus or try to show that dependent types are actually easy, easier than than normal type level programming in Haskell.

Conor

Awesome. So uh you are trying to find use cases in the wild that are actually, you know, applied dependent types, is that correct?

Andor Pénzes

Yes, exactly. And my strategy here is like first I read the uh type-driven development uh from Edwin Brady, that was a really good book. And after I just like let's just grab another book from my bookshef and try to apply dependent types there and see where is actually there are the sweet spots. Where are the sweet spots that are actually dependent types make sense and I we don't overdo it. It's not painful, it's more like it's helping us.

Conor

Awesome. If people want to learn more about dependent pipes slash follow you on the socials, what's the best way for folks to do that? I have a Twitter account that we can link we can link that. Awesome, we will link that in the show notes. Anything else you want to say? How's is this your first time to Lambda Days? Have you been here before? How what are your thoughts about the conference?

Andor Pénzes

Uh this is a really good conference. I really like this conference because it's not really language specific. Previously I always attended like Haskell conferences, and now this is my first real functional programming conference in the sense that there are many so f many many functional programming languages, and it's this is a this is something fresh for me, and this is my first time at Lambda Days.

Conor

You think you'll be back in the future to Lambdays 2024 some some version in the future? Definitely. Awesome. Thanks for being on the podcast. Cheers. We're back with Kim. We are gonna hopefully find Becca, who gave a lightning talk on functional females later, to talk more about functional females. But here we are standing with Kim, and she mentions she's a part of the functional females organization. I'm not sure as an organizer or as a a member, so tell us a bit about functional females and how other conferences can get involved or have them involved in their conference.

Kim Huizing

Okay, so I am not an organizer. Uh Becca and Liv are the organizers, full credit to them. Uh they did a great job setting it up. It's very, very new. It launched about two months ago. Uh and I am a community lead for the Scala community.

Conor

Interesting. And is this a global organization or is it based mostly in Europe? Because I'd never heard about them before attending this conference today or and yesterday.

Kim Huizing

Yes, so far uh I think all the members are Europe-based. It's about 70 women so far uh that work in various uh functional programming languages, and so far all based in Europe. Uh but I don't think it's a requirement to be based in Europe.

Conor

Interesting. So I'm primarily a member of the C community. Would functional females be interested in entering C? Because we got we got some functional stuff, or are you guys trying to stick to like the Lambda days, you know, Zurihack, I don't know, all the functional conferences. Uh what's what's the main sort of uh vision of of functional females?

Kim Huizing

Uh yeah, as far as I know, we're not really uh into C. Uh we have uh yeah, Scala is the largest group so far, so we're uh very focused on Scala events, uh also Elixir and Rust, um and yeah, just functional uh conferences like this one.

Conor

Wait, you guys are interested in Rust but not C ⁇ ? What what's going on? What's going on here?

Kim Huizing

Talk to Becca and Liv.

Conor

We will f we will find Becca and Liv, and we will get to the bottom of this, folks. Alright, thanks Kim for being on the pod for the third time. Enjoy the rest of your dessert.

Kim Huizing

Thank you so much. I just keep coming back for work.

Conor

Alright. We're here, we're back, we're interviewing Lambda Days, 2023, day two. We're here with Pierre. Am I pronouncing that correctly?

Peer Stritzinger

Pierre.

Conor

Pierre.

Peer Stritzinger

But I listen to Pierre too.

Conor

You listen, you listen to the new speaker say Pierre. It's better than Peter that I was calling you for like the first couple hours when I everything works. Everything works. Pierre, Peter, whatever. Alright, so uh most of the folks won't know you. Introduce yourself, uh, where are you from, where what company do you work for, and sort of what uh technologies are you working with?

Peer Stritzinger

So, yeah, the poll name is Pierre Stritzinger, which um is also the name of my company, and uh we basically run Erlang directly on hardware, and that's what I've been presenting on here several times in the past. And this time I was lazy and didn't submit the talk, and I'm just like hanging around stuff. You did you did give a lightning talk today? You wasn't completely lazy. Tell us what you talked about in the lightning talk. Um in the lightning talk, I just gave the GRISP roadmap of what we have what we're up to. Um basically, so we built hardware to actually run, make it easier to for other people to run it on the hardware, um, so we can actually provide a better user experience. And I gave the roadmap of the next things to come, um like little hardware sensor modules that we are building uh to plug into the main board, a battery board, like a like charger board, and um and also GRISP 0, which will be the new thing, which will be the smallest thing that will be running the full-blown Yalang VM.

Conor

And if I recall correctly, correctly in the talk, you mentioned that the Zero was inspired by the Raspberry Pi Zero, which I don't know much about, but so what's the uh sort of difference, or is it is there a comparison between the Raspberry Pi and Grisp, or are they completely different? Not at all. Uh I just saw the name. And so tell us a bit more about Grisp. Like, so if people are interested in you know acquiring this hardware, is it something that people can use for hobby projects, or is it used by sort of big companies? Uh what do what do folks use the hardware for?

Peer Stritzinger

Um so the hardware and the software stack, because the software stack is the actually the more important thing. The hardware is just an evaluation board to actually try it out, is used by industry. Um, as I know of mainly by us, also for developing our own products. Um it's used by a lot of universities for teaching, because it's um it's more fun to for the professor not to have to read half of the master thesis about like how to got a uh a Raspberry Pi working with Erlang and then having a bit switched on, uh, because that's always the same. Uh because this kind of like the zero-to-blinken light we actually can provide in 10 minutes. Uh and then you start to do fun stuff. Um and it's also used by hobbyists for all kinds of things. Awesome.

Conor

So we'll I'll be sure to find links that we can put in the show notes if people are interested in in checking this out. If people don't know much about Erlang, because I think most of our listeners are sort of in the C space, you know, give us like a 30-second overview of Erlang and why people might be interested in Erlang and not Elixir, because we talked to Jose Valim uh uh earlier, and you know, he's the creator of the Elixir language, which is built on top of the beam. Anyways, I'll let you talk about Erlang and why people might be interested.

Peer Stritzinger

Yeah, so the the the beam is the common virtual machine that we share. Well, actually, Elixir is not like based on the beam, but actually based on Erlang. It's running on top of Erlang. So without Erlang, Elixir would not be there. Um Erlang is basically the base technology, the older language. Um it I don't know. Um I mean if you like Ruby syntax more, use Elixir. If you like Prolog syntax more, you don't care about syntax, you use Erlang. It's more kind of like it it is older, but it uh it's also more kind of like to the ground what the actual virtual machine does. Um so the unique selling point why you want to use it, or both both both languages, is uh it's the only systems that allow um full-torm programs. So you your software has bugs, uh, but your code keeps running and working.

Conor

And there's a pretty big company that was acquired, what was it, for 20 billion, 30 billion that we we were talking about last night?

Peer Stritzinger

Oh, you mean WhatsApp, yeah. Oh, it's run everywhere. Basically I uh there was an estimate once that 95% of the human communication goes over a system with Erlang at some point. Um, so that includes all the Ericsson base stations. Um, all Cisco switches have Erlang in them. Um, WhatsApp has Erlang in them, and then probably you're already in five 95%. Oh, I had no I I knew about the WhatsApp story, I had no idea about the other stuff. Erlang is used for a lot of infrastructure stuff uh and is hidden in a lot of places where people don't know it, where people actually need this robustness. Um for example, all the banks use Erlang for trading. They just don't talk about it, so we don't know. I mean we we know in the Erlang community, but it's not official, they don't talk about it.

Conor

Interesting. I'm gonna have to find some links to Link in the show notes. Because I I know a little bit about Erlang, but not that it's used globally around the world. Last thing I'll ask, uh I believe, if I recall correctly from last night, you have been attending Lambda Days for a very long time, if not from the get-go, is that true?

Peer Stritzinger

Uh I think I missed the first one. I I think the my my first one was the second one. And there was the break during the pandemic, and I couldn't have attended last year, but I was at all others.

Conor

And so you've you've been a longtime attendee, keep coming back. Why is Lambda Day so awesome? And you know, if someone's thinking about coming to Lambda Days in the future, what would you tell them?

Peer Stritzinger

It I mean if you are if you are into functional programming or you want to find out about functional programming, because both works very well, Lambda Place is a very good place to be. It's it's a great conference. They have so so great content, they always come home with ideas, and it's not like a theoretical conference like uh like ICFP on functional programming, like academic conference. There's academic stuff and industry stuff mixed, and I think that's the strength here. And also Krakow is a very nice city to go to.

Conor

Krakow is very beautiful, I can't confirm. Uh last thing, if people want to follow you online on the socials, is is there a best place that they can do that?

Peer Stritzinger

Um well, I'm on Twitter. Um Twitter handle, my personal Twitter handle is PRSTR. Um, and uh the GRISP board is basically on or the GRISP project is on Grisp.org. Um on Twitter as well? On Twitter as well, and you will also find me via the website of GRISP and whatever.

Conor

Awesome, I will link all of that stuff in the show notes. Thanks so much for being on the pod. Thank you. Be sure to check the show notes either in your podcast app or at adspthepodcast.com for links to any of the things we mentioned, including all of the talks and resources, as well as a link to a GitHub discussion if you have any comments, questions, or thoughts on today's episode. And once again, thank you to everyone who agreed to be interviewed at Lambda Days. Thanks for listening. We hope you enjoyed and have a great day.