Episode 89: Joe Armstrong on Erlang

In this Episode we're talking about Erlang with its creator Joe
Armstrong. We started by looking at the history of the Erlang
language and why it is so relevant today. We then looked at Joe's
approach to Concurrency Oriented Programming and its main
ingredients: share nothing, lightweight concurrency and pure
message passing. We also compared this to the classic shared memory
approach to concurrency. We then looked at other interesting
aspects of Erlang, such as its functional nature (and why this is
important to concurrency) and pattern matching. Next we discussed
how to implement distribution and fault tolerance, and we took a
look at OTP, the "application server" for Erlang. We concluded the
conversation with a littel discussion about how Erlang was
designed, it's current community as well as its future.