LiveBook is similar to goals to Jupyter Notebooks. This piggybacks off the work being done with the Nx project which is implementing ML in Elixir: https://github.com/elixir-nx/nx
Jose Valim is the author of Elixir, the language that uses the BEAM Erlang VM.
He was actually one of the top Rails contributors in 2014. They also built what became the defacto standard authentication library (devise) before working on Elixir.
Interestingly enough a lot of good engineering branched out of the rails community.
I can see why Elixir has a Ruby-like syntax now.
Yes, it was very much intentional. I believe he has said that he was looking for Ruby, but good at concurrency and then discovered Erlang.
Is there an example for self-hosting LiveBook for collaboration?