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Joe Armstrong, Father of Erlang

 Joe  Armstrong

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 obtained 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 "Programming Erlang: 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: A language for programming reliable systems"

Time: Friday 10:45 - 11:45

Location: Westminster Suite

Abstract: Erlang was designed in 1986 at Ericsson for building Carrier Grade Telecoms systems. Erlang has a number of unique features that are explicitly designed into the language to simplify programming non-stop systems. For example, Erlang code can be changed on-the-fly so that systems can be upgraded without taking them out of service. Such systems have been deployed by Ericsson and are routinely upgraded with zero loss of service. The largest system written in Erlang is the Ericsson AXD301 (an asynchronous transfer mode switch) which has outstanding in-service performance and which has achieved "nine nines" reliability. In this lecture I'll start with an overview of the techniques we use to achieve high reliability. I'll show how these relate to language primitives in Erlang and to a number design patterns that we use to build highly reliable systems.

Training: "Getting Started with Erlang"

Track: Tutorial

Time: Tuesday 09:00 - 16:00

Location: Wordsworth Room

Abstract: Do you want to write concurrent programs that just run faster as you run on more cores? - Do you want to write fault-tolerant applications that run forever?

Of course you do!

Getting started with Erlang is a hands-on tutorial to get you started
with this.
By the time the tutorial is over your brain should be spinning with
new ideas, you'll have written several Erlang programs and your
fingers will itch to write more Erlang programs.
You'll be expected to bring a Laptop with a working version of Erlang installed. Prior to the course you should have installed Erlang and made sure you can start an Erlang shell (we're not going to waste any time with the mechanics of Erlang installation - so when the course starts we'll jump in at the deep end and start hacking).
Don't worry - before the course we'll send out detailed instructions on how to install Erlang - and you can mail Joe if anything goes wrong. This is not an overview course for managers, it's a hands-on hacking course for programmers. We'll assume no previous knowledge of functional or concurrent programming but start off at a leisurely tempo banging the fundamental stuff into your brains.  Then we'll speed up (sadistic grin). You'll learn how to write concurrent, fault-tolerant, distributed soft real-time programs...