Erlang with Joe Armstrong
“Mutable state is the root of all evil.”
Erlang is a functional, concurrent programming language that was originally designed within Ericsson in the 1980’s. It was built to support distributed, fault-tolerant, non-stop applications suitable for telecommunications infrastructure.
Joe Armstrong is one of the designers of Erlang, and the chief architect of the Open Telecom Platform (OTP), a framework for building Erlang applications.
Questions
- Why has Erlang persisted as such a popular tool for communications platforms?
- In the domain of telecom, what were the valuable features of languages like Lisp and Prolog?
- How did Erlang germinate?
- Can you give a high level description for how someone using Erlang should be thinking about concurrency?
- What are the advantages of functional programming languages?
- Why did object oriented programming become so prevalent and so widely used?
- How has the Erlang community changed over time?
