Presentation: "Erlang - software for a concurrent world"

Time: Monday 13:00 - 14:00

Location: Conference Hall 3

Abstract:

How do you program a multicore computer? Easy - do it in Erlang.

Erlang is a concurrent functional programming language designed for programming fault-tolerant systems.

Erlang has:

  • Share-nothing semantics. Processes are lightweight and share nothing. There are no locks, no mutexes, and no shared memory.
  • Pure message passing. Messages are copied in their entirety.
  • Advanced mechanism for code-loading "on-the-fly" etc (to build systems which never stop and which can be upgraded in-service)

Most Erlang programs have no multiple or shared state and scale well on multicore computers.

In his talk Joe introduces Erlang and the ideas of Concurrent Oriented Programming.
He will talk about the language, the philosophy behind the language, the implementation and about a number of commercial applications which are written in Erlang.

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Joe Armstrong, Ericsson

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 obtain 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 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.