Erlang's Creator Speaks About Its History and Prospects

Seal writes "Erlang, originally created at Ericsson in 1986, is a functional programming language which was released as open source around 10 years ago and flourished ever since. In this Q&A, Erlang creator Joe Armstrong talks about its beginnings as a control program for a telephone exchange, its flexibility and its modern day usage in open source programs. 'In the Erlang world we have over twenty years of experience with designing and implementing parallel algorithms. What we lose in sequential processing speed we win back in parallel performance and fault-tolerance,' Armstrong said. He also mentions how multi-core processors pushed the development of Erlang and the advantages of hot swapping."

Facebook's Use of Erlang

[miller60]

Erlang is used in Facebook Chat, which just hit 1 billion messages [datacenterknowledge.com] a day. Eugene Letuchy discussed Facebook's use of Erlang at the Erlang Factory [erlang-factory.com] event.

Re:CSP makes parallel programming easy

[TwistedSquare]

Erlang is based on the ACTOR model, not CSP. The main practical differences between Erlang and CSP is that Erlang uses asynchronous dynamically-typed messages sent to a particular address (process id), whereas CSP systems usually deal with synchronous messages sent down a particular, typed channel. But they are both message-passing systems with the idea of removing shared mutable data, as you say. For an implementation of CSP in the pure functional language Haskell, see my library CHP (http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/projects/ofa/chp/).

If you want to know more...

[jandrese]

There is even a movie [youtube.com] about Erlang that should give you a good idea of what its strengths are.

Re:If you want to know more...

[Anonymous Coward]

This has been my absolute favorite in IT videos since I first saw it a year ago. It has that unashamed old-time dorkiness that I'm so nostalgic for. Get it in better-than-youtube quality at archive.org [archive.org].