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Louis Pilfold

Author of Gleam, Elixir contributor

Louis is an enthusiastic, jack-of-all-trades software engineer who writes code in many languages, some of which don’t even exist yet! A firm believer in open source, he maintains and contributes to many open source projects in the Erlang ecosystem and beyond.

Professionally Louis is developing the Gleam programming language.

Unprofessionally Louis is collecting terrible dance music and wearing shoes with toes.

Past Activities

Louis Pilfold
Code Mesh LDN
07 Nov 2019
13.40 - 14.25

Gleam: Lean BEAM typing machine

With their impressive concurrency features and robust approach to handling failure, it is a joy to build scalable and reliable systems with BEAM languages such as Erlang and Elixir! However, all is not perfect: as codebases get larger and less familiar it becomes more difficult to make changes, with mistakes creating bugs that test out runtime resilience and make pagers ring in the middle of the night.

In this talk, Louis introduces Gleam, a new language that takes inspiration from strongly typed languages such as Haskell, Rust and Elm to help BEAM programmers tackle these problems. He'll take a look at what Gleam offers, how it's made, and how it complements and interoperates with other BEAM languages. Lastly, Louis will take a peek at what's planned for Gleam and how people can get involved with the language and the community.

THIS TALK IN THREE WORDS

Strong

Typing

Propaganda

OBJECTIVES

To get people excited about strongly typed programming on the BEAM.

TARGET AUDIENCE

Anyone interested in static types, the Erlang ecosystem, or friendly programming languages.

Louis Pilfold / Leandro Ostera / Stavros Aronis
Code BEAM V Europe 2021
19 May 2021
14.30 - 15.10

Fireside Chat: Making a type-safe language on the BEAM

"Gleam is a fast, friendly, and functional language for building type-safe, scalable systems."

"Caramel is a functional language for building type-safe, scalable and maintainable applications."

These are currently the official slogans of the Gleam and Caramel languages, and it's easy to see the alignment on functional programming, scalability and maintainability. But with both being languages running on the BEAM, these are not too surprising. Type-safety on the BEAM, on the other hand? That is a more intriguing story! Join us on this fireside chat hosted by Stavros Aronis, where Louis Pilford, author of Gleam, and Leandro Ostera, author of Caramel, will answer all your questions about making a type-safe language on the BEAM!

Louis Pilfold
Code BEAM Lite Berlin
11 Oct 2019
09.10 - 09.50

Gleam: Lean BEAM typing machine

With their impressive concurrency features and robust approach to handling failure, it is a joy to build scalable and reliable systems with BEAM languages such as Erlang and Elixir! However, all is not perfect: as codebases get larger and less familiar it becomes more difficult to make changes, with mistakes creating bugs that test out runtime resilience and make pagers ring in the middle of the night.

In this talk, Louis introduces Gleam, a new language that takes inspiration from strongly typed languages such as Haskell, Rust and Elm to help BEAM programmers tackle these problems. We'll take a look at what Gleam offers, how it's made, and how it complements and interoperates with other BEAM languages. Lastly, we'll take a peek at what's planned for Gleam and how people can get involved with the language and the community.

OBJECTIVES

To get people excited about strongly typed programming on the BEAM.

AUDIENCE

Any level.