A History of Erlang
Bio: Joe Armstrong is a retired Adjunct Prof of Computer Science at KTH.
He has a PhD in computer science from KTH, invented Erlang, started a few companies, written a few books and generally had fun messing around with computers.
Time: Tue 2018-01-23 15.00 - 17.00
Location: Lecture Hall A, floor 2, Electrum Kista
Participating: Joe Armstrong
[mostly for ID1019, but others are welcome also]
This lecture is about the history of Erlang.
Erlang started in 1986 as a simple experiment in controlling a switch in the Ericsson Computer Science Laboratory.
Today Erlang and related languages like Elixir control billions of phones and mobile devices all over the world - Erlang powers WhatsApp and Ericsson smartphone data, and many other things like the National Health service database in the UK.
There were many twists and turns in the story - Erlang was banned by Ericsson but survived the ban and became open source.
In this lecture I'll show you some of the original code and documentation of the system and tell you about the wars we won and lost, it's not just about the technology but all the other things that happened.
It's really about what I've been doing for the last 30 odd years and how I got my grey hairs.