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As a regular full stack developer writing Elixir full time, what is the use of such a library? I have heard of Tensorflow, there is mention of tensors in this article, but what would be the practical use of such a library, in the real world? When would one write code like the one shown in the examples?

I'm happy that Elixir is becoming more and more mainstream. It's the best language I've used in my 15 years in the business.

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At a company I work for we manipulate a lot of weather data which comes in the form of big multi-dimensional arrays of numbers. We use Elixir but we delegate this data processing to Python using the xarray library. Nx is the foundation of an ecosystem that would allow to build similar libraries for Elixir.

If I may ask, why is your company using Elixir? Wouldn't it make more sense to use Python everywhere on your web stack if you do scientific work on weather data?

In fact the vast majority of our data processing is in Python but we also have some R and shell scripts. Elixir is great for orchestrating parallel data processing and building reactive UIs showing what's happening in real-time. The Erlang VM has interesting performance and introspection capabilities and Elixir being a younger language its tooling is a lot less messy.

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