COORDINATION 2010 Invited Speaker

Joe Armstrong (Ericsson Telecom AB)

Erlang-style concurrency

Erlang combines ideas from Agent programming, functional programming and uses pure message passing concurrency to provide a substrate for building reliable systems. In addition it provides several novel techniques for error detection and correction, pattern matching over binary data and has mechanisms for changing code in a running system without stopping the system.
Erlang was designed in the mid 1980s and has been in use since the mid 90's powering several enterprise switching systems. About five years ago, with the emergence of multicore computers it was realised that Erlang concurrency model fitted well with modern multicores. This together with a re-emergence of interest in functional programming language has lead to a surge of popularity in the language.
This talk presents what could be called "the Erlang style concurrency" - and explains what we believe to be important when designing robust concurrent systems.
The talk will summarise what we have learnt in the last twenty years and talk about some of the applications that have been built in Erlang and why these applications have succeeded.

Bio

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 obtained 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 again.
He is author of the book "Programming Erlang: Software for a concurrent world": (Pragmatic Bookshelf - 2007).