Joe Armstrong (programmer)


Joseph Leslie Armstrong was a computer scientist working in the area of fault-tolerant distributed systems. He is best known as one of the co-designers of the Erlang programming language.

Early life and education

Armstrong was born in Bournemouth, England in 1950.
At 17, Armstrong began programming Fortran on his local council's mainframe. This experience helped him during his physics studies at University College London, where he debugged the programs of his fellow students in exchange for beer. While working for the Ericsson Computer Science Lab, he helped develop Erlang in 1986.

Career

He received a Ph.D. in computer science from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden in 2003. His dissertation was titled Making reliable distributed systems in the presence of software errors. He was a professor at KTH since 2014.

Death

He died on 20 April 2019 from an infection which was complicated by pulmonary fibrosis.

Personal life

Work

Peter Seibel wrote:
Originally a physicist, he switched to computer science when he ran out of money in the middle of his physics PhD and landed a job as a researcher working for Donald Michie—one of the founders of the field of artificial intelligence in Britain. At Michie's lab, Armstrong was exposed to the full range of AI goodies, becoming a founding member of the British Robotics Association and writing papers about robotic vision.
When funding for AI dried up as a result of the famous Lighthill report|Lighthill , it was back to physics-related programming for more than half a decade, first at the EISCAT scientific association and later the Swedish Space Corporation, before finally joining the Ericsson Computer Science Lab, where he invented Erlang.

While working at Ericsson in 1986, Joe Armstrong was one of the designers and implementers of Erlang.

Erlang

Along with Robert Virding and Mike Williams in 1986, Armstrong developed Erlang, which was released as open source in 1998.

Recognition

Publications