273: Does the Language Really Matter?
🎯 Summary
Podcast Summary: 273: Does the Language Really Matter?
This episode of Thinking Elixir focuses heavily on recent developments within the Elixir/BEAM ecosystem, particularly around tooling, security posture, and database advancements, while also touching upon broader AI industry trends. The central theme, as suggested by the title, seems to be less about the language itself and more about the robust, evolving tooling and community efforts that make the language viable and secure for professional use.
1. Focus Area
The primary focus areas are Elixir/BEAM Ecosystem Tooling and Security, Database Technology (PostgreSQL), and Generative AI/LLM Tooling.
2. Key Technical Insights
- Web Interaction Tooling for LLM Agents: Chris McCord released a public Go-lang tool that converts web page content (including JS execution and interaction) into Markdown for LLM consumption, offering a potentially cheaper, self-hosted alternative to expensive proprietary web search APIs from OpenAI/Anthropic.
- PostgreSQL 18 Performance & Flexibility: Major updates include index skip scans for multi-column indexes (improving query efficiency when only a subset of indexed columns is needed) and the introduction of virtual columns computed at query time, allowing for dynamic data extraction (e.g., from JSONB or UUIDs) without materializing storage.
- Zoe Schema Validation: A new Elixir library, inspired by TypeScript’s Zod, offers a simple, flexible, and less tedious way to define and validate/coerce incoming data (like web input) compared to relying solely on Ecto Changesets.
3. Market/Investment Angle
- Security as a Competitive Advantage: The discussion highlights that the BEAM ecosystem’s smaller attack surface (compared to NPM/JavaScript) and proactive security planning (Aegis Initiative) provide a genuine, albeit often overlooked, security benefit that can influence enterprise adoption, especially given upcoming regulations like the EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA).
- Tooling Maturity: The immediate usability of new tools like Zoe and Ash Diagrams suggests the Elixir ecosystem is rapidly filling necessary gaps, making it more attractive for production systems that require strong data validation and clear architectural visualization.
- LLM Cost Optimization: The open-sourcing of web scraping/parsing tools for agents points to a market trend where developers seek to reduce reliance on expensive, token-heavy proprietary LLM tools for basic web interaction tasks.
4. Notable Companies/People
- Chris McCord: Released the public web-scraping CLI tool derived from his
fly.ioagent work. - Michael Lubis (Paraxial.io): Discussed the nuances of “security through obscurity.”
- Jonathan Manchin: Creator of Ash Diagrams, noted for his active role in the EEF security working group.
- Anthropic: Released Claude 3.5 and Claude Code 2.0, continuing the rapid pace of LLM competition.
5. Regulatory/Policy Discussion
- EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA): This legislation is driving significant security improvements within the BEAM ecosystem. The Erlang Ecosystem Foundation (EEF) is actively preparing by implementing the Aegis Initiative to meet requirements for open-source software stewards.
- EEF Aegis Initiative: This plan includes webhooks for publishers, trusted publishing via SLSA provenance, registry scanning, and transparency logs, aiming to secure the software supply chain and make Elixir/OTP compliant for EU deployment.
6. Future Implications
The industry is moving toward highly secure, verifiable software supply chains, driven by legislation like the CRA. For Elixir, this means formalizing vulnerability reporting (CNA/CVE integration) and ensuring critical libraries are financially supported. In AI, the rapid iteration cycle suggests that specialized models (like Claude’s coding capabilities) will continue to trade leadership positions, emphasizing the need for developers to benchmark tools against specific language needs (Elixir scored well in recent LLM coding benchmarks).
7. Target Audience
This episode is most valuable for Elixir/BEAM developers, architects, and engineering leaders concerned with application security, database performance optimization, and staying current with ecosystem tooling maturity. It is also relevant for AI/ML practitioners integrating LLMs into development workflows.
🏢 Companies Mentioned
💬 Key Insights
"Their question is, does it even make sense to do these top languages list anymore because we don't have insights. We don't have the visibility to know what people are actually using because there's a route to go around it to being completely private."
"Programmers are turning away from all these public expressions of interest rather than flip through a book or search a website like Stack Exchange for answers to their questions. Instead, they go straight to an LLM like Claude or ChatGPT in a private conversation."
"And anecdotally, you can't go to Reddit anymore and like look at like the Anthropic's Reddit or the Cloud Code subreddit and just trust anything that's in there now. Because like it is 90 percent, like it's got to be like just AI bot."
"Finally establishing the foundation as the financial fiscal host to fund critical libraries that are very important to the ecosystem. That basically that are de facto that are everywhere, right? We need to make sure that those are taken care of."
"In isolation, or just in reaction to all that stuff, this is also part of the Cyber Resilience Act, which is a big legal act, I guess, primarily in the EU and the US is going to benefit from this as well. The purpose of that act is, well, is to make things like this, the software delivery pipelines, much more secure."
"The bullet points are: web hooks backed to EFA required for publishers. Does this include Hex? I'm not sure yet. Anything that's being published, we'll figure out what that means eventually. Trusted publishing, VSCI, so no status keys, six store and SLA provenance to verify builds. So that goes into what software is included in your build."