GUUG-Frühjahrsfachgespräch 2003

I talk about

• The Background and Philosophy behind Erlang
• Erlang - the technology
• I discuss the major commercial successes of Erlang.
• Future problem areas

Background and Philosophy

Erlang is a concurrent programming language with a functional core. Process creation and message passing in Erlang is extremely light-weight compared to the threads implementation in, for example, pthreads, java or C#.

Erlang is the most widely used functional programming language used for real-commercial applications.

In this talk I talk about "Concurrency Oriented" programming and design.

I argue that concurrent programs are easier to write and understand than sequential programs.

I argue that concurrent programming is perceived as difficult only because of the terrible implementation of threads in mostly operating systems and languages.

I argue that concurrency is the "natural" way to structure complex applications.

Erlang - the technology

I talk about Erlang (the language) OTP (the libraries) and the Open Source Erlang release.

I give examples of simple Erlang programs which solve traditionally "hard" problems, for example: Changing the code in a server "on the fly" i.e. while operating the service.

I give an example of a fault-tolerant server with redundant and hot fail-over characteristics.

Commercial Successes of Erlang

I discuss a number of commercially successful products which use the Erlang technology - these include:

These include:

• The Ericsson AXD301 and GRPS systems

(The Ericsson AXD301 is an ATM switch with over 1,7 Million lines - of Erlang - it has a faulty tolerant architecture - and has achieved "9 nines" reliability in a test performed by British Telecom)

• The Nortel SSL accelerator

Future Areas

I discuss the future problem areas where I expect interesting developments in distributed computing. In particular:

• Erlang for peer-to-peer computations
• Erlang for secure agent computing

Joe Armstrong, Swedish Institute of Computer Science

Joe Armstrong is principle designer of the programming language Erlang. He is an experienced systems designer and has worked as a compiler writer, technical author and entrepreneur, and has been designing and programming fault-tolerant distributed systems for the last 20 odd years.

Joe was a founder member of the company Bluetail which sold commercial products based on Erlang and Linux.

Joe has had over 20 years experience designing and programming fault-tolerant distributed systems.

Joe now works at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science.