Joe Armstrong, Ericsson

Joe Armstrong is the principle inventor of the Erlang programming Language and coined the term "Concurrency Oriented Programming". He has worked for Ericsson where he developed Erlang and was chief architect of the Erlang/OTP system.

In 1998 he left Ericsson to form Bluetail, a company which developed all its products in Erlang. In 2003 he obtain his PhD from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. The title of his thesis was "Making reliable distributed systems in the presence of software errors." Today he works for Ericsson.

He is author of the book Software for a concurrent world: (Pragmatic Bookshelf - July 15, 2007). He is married with 2 children, 2 cats and 4 motorcycles and would very much like to sell his Royal Enfield Bullet and replace it with a Norton Commando.

Presentation: "Erlang"

Track: Interviews

Time: Thursday 11:00 - 12:00

Location: Wordsworth Room

Presentation: "Functions + Messages + Concurrency = Erlang"

Track: Programming Languages of Tomorrow

Time: Friday 13:00 - 14:00

Location: Westminster Suite

Abstract:

Erlang is a programming language explicitly designed for building robust, distributed, soft real-time, distributed systems.

Erlang programs are built from a large number of communicating parallel processes. These processes share no memory and communicate by pure copying message passing.

This model of programming is easy to understand, is scalable and functions well in the presence of errors. There is no shared memory and the programs have no locks so Erlang programs can easily be parallelised and run on multicore computers.

Inside an Erlang process lurks a functional programming language with a dynamic type system.

This talk highlights the Erlang view of the world - showing how we can model the world using concurrent processes, and how we can program these processes in a simple functional language. We'll also look at some of the commercial areas where Erlang is being used and see what kind of problems are best suited to the Erlang approach.