Building Multilingual and Culturally Inclusive Applications with Elixir

The presentation by Petrus Janse van Rensburg focused on leveraging Elixir and Erlang's resilience to develop globally distributed software that is sensitive to various languages, currencies, and calendars. The key tools highlighted for achieving this goal were gettext for static content translation and CLDR for dynamic content such as numbers, dates, and database records. He demonstrated the powerful capabilities of tools like ex_cldr, ex_money, and ex_cldr_dates_times to handle diverse localizations seamlessly. The talk also covered the significance of compile-time vs. runtime considerations in dealing with localization data. Petrus emphasized that building such personalized applications simplifies the codebase and avoids peppering it with conditional logic. The talk also stressed the business potential of supporting diverse languages as a means of penetrating global markets. Additionally, he hinted at a collaborative book he's authoring with Kip Cole, the creator of the Elixir CLDR libraries, to help developers navigate the complex ecosystem.