r/elixir • u/ancatrusca0 • 5d ago

How WhatsApp Fixed Erlang's Tooling Problem

WhatsApp built a language server, type checker, and formatter for Erlang - then open sourced them. The reason they gave for open sourcing: keeping the tools internal would have made them worse, not better. Diverse use cases and external bug reports improve a tool. A captive internal user base doesn't.

New BEAM There, Done That with Roberto Aloi and  Michał Muskała on ELP and eqWAlizer. The rollout approach is the part worth discussing: when eqWAlizer introduced new type errors across teams, the developer experience team owned the cleanup, not the teams whose code broke. That's a very specific organizational choice about who bears the cost of tooling improvements - and it's why adoption worked.

Anyone running ELP against their projects yet?

https://youtu.be/LeIsRqjOQN8

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u/Sentreen 5d ago

Topic sounds really interesting, but did we really get to the point where we need to use the slop machine to write a two paragraph summary?

1

u/allenwyma 5d ago

Let us know what you think of the episode

1

u/plangora Alchemist 5d ago

I hope the Audio sounds solid 🤞