QFM130: Elixir Reading List - September 2026
Source: Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash
Foundations, twice over. José Valim's ElixirConf US keynote, Set-Theoretic Types from Scratch, does what its title promises for Elixir's type system.
The Gnome Village does the same for the runtime underneath, and Erik Stenman, who wrote The BEAM Book, gets there through gnomes, backpacks and a great deal of mail. It dates from last November, which for an explanation of the BEAM is no age at all.
As always, the Quantum Fax Machine Propeller Hat Key will guide your browsing. Enjoy!
Propeller Hat Key
- 1 of 5:
- Mentions Elixir and related technologies
- 2 of 5:
- Talks about the Elixir ecosystem in real-world use cases
- 3 of 5:
- Talks about technical details of Elixir ecosystem components
- 4 of 5:
- Using and working with Elixir ecosystem technologies in software
- 5 of 5:
- Programming new Elixir technology concepts and implementations
Links
In this ElixirConf US 2026 keynote, published on Code Sync's channel, José Valim walks through Elixir's set-theoretic type system from the ground up, sharing the ideas behind it and how it comes together. It runs about fifty minutes, and it starts from scratch, as the title promises.
Erik Stenman, author of The BEAM Book, explains the BEAM's process model through one metaphor for developers still carrying object-oriented habits. Each gnome is a process, with its own backpack (its heap), its own mailbox and its own garbage collection; gnomes cooperate only by sending mail; code sits on a shared shelf of scrolls that can be swapped without stopping the village; and every gnome gets a fair turn at the workbench, counted in reductions. Isolation is the point: a gnome that falls takes nobody else with it. Published in November 2025, it opens a series that goes on to supervisors, domains and flows.
Regards,
M@
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Originally published on quantumfaxmachine.com and cross-posted on Medium.
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