Erlang Creator Joe Armstrong Has Died (twitter.com) 60
Rogers Cadenhead (Slashdot reader #4,482) writes:
Joe Armstrong, the computer scientist best known as one of the creators of the Erlang programming language, died Saturday. Erlang Solutions founder Francesco Cesarini shared the news on Twitter and said, "His work has laid the foundation which will be used by generations to come. RIP @joeerl, thank you for inspiring us all."
Erlang was created by Armstrong, Robert Virding and Mike Williams at the Ericsson telecom company in 1986 and became open source 12 years later. It is known for functional programming, immutable data, code hot-swapping and systems that require insanely high levels of availability.
In another Tweet, Cesarini asks people to share their own memories of Armstrong -- " funny, enlightening or plain silly." And Ulf Wiger, who describes himself as an Erlang old-timer, remembered giving a talk about how to avoid projects dominated by mediocrity. "I used Joe as an example of a 'brilliant developer, but hard to fit into a regular project.'"
Joe had replied, "I am very EASY to fit into regular projects! It's just that so few projects are regular..."
Erlang was created by Armstrong, Robert Virding and Mike Williams at the Ericsson telecom company in 1986 and became open source 12 years later. It is known for functional programming, immutable data, code hot-swapping and systems that require insanely high levels of availability.
In another Tweet, Cesarini asks people to share their own memories of Armstrong -- " funny, enlightening or plain silly." And Ulf Wiger, who describes himself as an Erlang old-timer, remembered giving a talk about how to avoid projects dominated by mediocrity. "I used Joe as an example of a 'brilliant developer, but hard to fit into a regular project.'"
Joe had replied, "I am very EASY to fit into regular projects! It's just that so few projects are regular..."
Re: and yet... (Score:4, Informative)
Perl was from 1987. Python is from 1991. Both were open source well before Erlang. All three are from the same era and are meant for different problems.
As much as I like Erlang, it serves quite a different niche than Perl or Python or any of the languages you listed.
Re: (Score:1)
RIP Joe (Score:1)
You will be missed!
Joe was a man of honor and respect. (Score:2, Informative)
Joe was truly a man of honor and respect. I will always remember him as being humble and kind, two traits that are missing in so many of today's programming language creators and open source leaders.
Look at the attitudes that open source "leaders" like Linus, Lennart, DHH and Steve Klabnik exhibit. They are the opposite of how Joe treated his fellow programmers, in my opinion. Joe didn't belittle us. Joe didn't force his software on us against our wills. Joe didn't have a constant smugness. Joe didn't use m
Re:Joe was a man of honor and respect. (Score:5, Informative)
First of all... Sam Aaron the "millennial on the left", which you randomly and pointlessly decided to sling mud at... something I think Joe, who you claim to respect, would never do.
1. Isn't a millennial (I get fuzzy on the cusp, but he graduated college in 2001)
2. He was a friend of Joe's (they even did presentations jointly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com])
3. Created Sonic Pi (which is awesome, can see in the above link)
you never goofed with friend ? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Perhaps you're missing the needed context and so you have chosen to assUme that the context is serious. Perhaps if you actually knew either of them you might know when and why the picture was taken and know why it is as it is.
Re: (Score:3)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] "The birth years of 1981 to 1996 were used in 2019 to define millennials by PBS, CBS, ABC Australia, The Washington Post, and The Washington Times. In 2018 they were used by The Los Angeles Times."
"As of 2019, the Pew Research Center defines millennials as born from 1981 to 1996, choosing these dates for "key political, economic and social factors""
"The American Psychological Association describes millennials as those born between the years 1981 and 1996."
Even if you use th
Re: How is this possible? (Score:1)
As an Erlang programmer, I can say with certainty that Joe's contributions to the computing industry have allowed many of us to live lives we never thought possible. We couldn't have built the extremely reliable software systems so many of us have worked on of it wasn't for Erlang. Joe's guidance revolutionized an entire industry. Not many people can say they've done that! While so many software development teams are struggling with languages like Rust and Ruby, those of us who know of Joe's work are gettin
Re: (Score:2)
Can't find anybody reporting his cause of death, but Wikipedia was able to tell me he was 68.
Re:Erlang, the OG hipster langauge (Score:4, Informative)
Erlang is quietly used all over the place, just doesn't toot its own horn. Your lack of awareness doesn't make that fact any less true.
- Used WhatsApp, you just used Erlang.
- Played a game of league of legends, you just used Erlang.
- Made a phone call, you likely just used Erlang.
- Used Amazon's SDB, you just used Erlang.
- Lots more, anything using CouchDB, RabbitMQ, Ejabberd, or the increasingly popular Elixir.
Re: (Score:3)
Used in lots of places [howfuckedi...tabase.com].
Re: Erlang, the OG hipster langauge (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
i think you misspelled Python
Erlang's very existence was due to real world large scale products. It was not designed as some academic exercise, but as a solution to a real problem (large concurrency on a telephone exchange). Because of that Erlang is actually one of the most practical real-world languages i know, because real world applications is part of its DNA
Re: (Score:2)
If you studied the history of Erlang you will see it was not created by academics but real engineers trying to solve complex problems a.k. how do design a fault tolerant large scale parallel system. Erlang and the associated OTP libraries provide the design methods to solve these and have been honed and proved on multiple real projects
Don't let your prejudices hit you on the way out
insanity was there for the taking (Score:2)
Actually, some of us think that computers were invented so that insanely high levels of availability and reliability could become the new normal.
In the blue trunks: Edsger W. Dijkstra, Ralph Nader, Donald Knuth, Leslie Lamport, Joe Armstrong, Jon Postel, Robin Milner, Daniel J. Bernstein, Theo de Raadt.
A tribute (Score:2)
This blog by Francesco Cessarini is a lovely tribute and provides a wonderful slice of history about the early days of Erlang development
https://www.erlang-solutions.c... [erlang-solutions.com]
I would also recommend anyone with a interest in concurrency programming to listen to this talk
https://www.erlang-solutions.c... [erlang-solutions.com]