“Mutable state is the root of all evil.”

Erlang is a functional, concurrent programming language that was originally designed within Ericsson in the 1980’s. It was built to support distributed, fault-tolerant, non-stop applications suitable for telecommunications infrastructure.

Joe Armstrong is one of the designers of Erlang, and the chief architect of the Open Telecom Platform (OTP), a framework for building Erlang applications.

Questions

Why has Erlang persisted as such a popular tool for communications platforms?

In the domain of telecom, what were the valuable features of languages like Lisp and Prolog?

How did Erlang germinate?

Can you give a high level description for how someone using Erlang should be thinking about concurrency?

What are the advantages of functional programming languages?

Why did object oriented programming become so prevalent and so widely used?

How has the Erlang community changed over time?

Links

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