[dba-Tech] Joe Armstrong

[Jim Lawrence]

The computer community has had the passing of one of the greats; Joe Armstrong, the father of Erlang, and the Erlang family.

https://twitter.com/FrancescoC/status/1119596234166218754

Below is just a small sampling of tributes to the life and accomplishments of Joe Armstrong:

https://ferd.ca/goodbye-joe.html
https://github.com/lukego/blog/issues/32

So what is Erlang?:

"...Erlang has some important features that made it worth learning. If you need to write programs that run super fast on a multicore computer, Erlang is a proper choice. Erlang is a Concurrency Oriented Programming Language (COPL) and processes are the primary components that construct an Erlang application." and "Erlang is a functional programming language. It's major strength is the concurrency and distributed programming. It has the ability to handle multiple threads (Process in Erlang terms) at the same time not utilizing double CPU processing power." Erlang, in a multi-anything environment is the fastest language. Without the features of Erlang, multi-user systems and super computers of today would not exist.

https://www.mcs.anl.gov/research/projects/mpi/

It is never too late to learn a little bit about Erlang. Note: that it is fully open source:
http://erlang.org/doc/
https://www.erlang.org/downloads

There is a host of other languages inspired by Erlang. Most of these languages are internet and server languages, so most of us, who work extensively on basic desktop and support of the desktop, rarely have obvious direct contact with Erlang type languages. (F# (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F_Sharp_(programming_language)) is but one of as many a 50 development languages which were spawned from Erlang.)

Most (all?) computer phones systems use either core Erlang or incorporate the Erlang principles. ie; "WhatsApp Messenger" has its whole core written in Erlang. All UNIX/Linux distros are built on Erlang principles. That is the reason, on your desktop or server Linux computer, you can be playing a game, listening to music, playing a movie, have someone doing remote access, sharing files back and forth, be running multiple websites and even with limited resources, never have a crash. If needed, Linux type operating systems can connect together like Lego blocks...that is why it is relatively inexpensive, using Erlang messaging components, to build your own super computer. So when you are running your Linux computers and they are massively over-loaded and everything is starting to slow down, this is why these systems never crash or "blue-screen" as many desktops are prone to do.

One of the great fathers computer systems, Joe Armstrong has died and we will all miss him, whether we know it or not.

Jim