The A-Z of Programming Languages: Erlang

By Kathryn Edwards, Computerworld Australia, 06/16/09

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Computerworld is undertaking a series of investigations into the most widely-used programming languages. Previously we have spoken to Larry Wall, creator of the Perl programming language, Don Syme, senior researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge, who developed F#, Simon Peyton-Jones on the development of Haskell, Alfred v. Aho of AWK fame, S. Tucker Taft on the Ada 1995 and 2005 revisions, Microsoft about its server-side script engine ASP, Chet Ramey about his experiences maintaining Bash, Bjarne Stroustrup of C++ fame, and Charles H. Moore about the design and development of Forth.

We've also had a chat with the irreverent Don Woods about the development and uses of INTERCAL, as well as Stephen C. Johnson on YACC, Steve Bourne on Bourne shell, Falcon creator Giancarlo Niccolai, Luca Cardelli on Modula-3, Walter Bright on D, Brendan Eich on JavaScript, Anders Hejlsberg on C#, Guido van Rossum on Python and Prof. Roberto Ierusalimschy on Lua. We most recently spoke to Tcl creator John Ousterhout.

In this interview Erlang creator Joe Armstrong, took some time to tellComputerworld about Erlang's development over the past 20 years, and what's in store for the language in the future.

If you wish to submit any suggestions for programming languages or language authors you would like to see covered, please email kathryn@computerworld.com.au

What's behind the name Erlang?

Either it's short for "Ericsson Language" or it's named after the Danish mathematician Agner Krarup Erlang. We have never revealed which of these is true, so you'll have to keep guessing!

What prompted its creation?

It was an accident. There was never a project "to create a new programming language". There was an Ericsson research project "to find better ways of programming telephony applications" and Erlang was the result.

Was there a particular problem the language aimed to solve?

Yes, we wanted to write a control program for a small telephone exchange in the best possible manner. A lot of the properties of Erlang can be traced back to this problem. Telephone exchanges should never stop, so we have to be able to upgrade code without stopping the system.

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