Joe Armstrong (programmer) - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.

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Joe Armstrong (programmer)

Joseph Leslie Armstrong (27 December 1950 – 20 April 2019)
Joe Armstrong
was a computer scientist working in the area of fault-tolerant
distributed systems. He is best known as the author of the Erlang
programming language.

Contents
Early life and education
Career
Death
Personal life
Work
Erlang
Recognition
Publications Armstrong in 2009
References
Born 27 December 1950
External links Bournemouth,
England, UK
Died 20 April 2019
Early life and education (aged 68)
Armstrong was born in Bournemouth in 1950.[1] Alma mater Royal Institute of
Technology (KTH) in
At 17, Armstrong began programming Fortran on his school
Stockholm, Sweden
district's mainframe. This experience helped him during his physics
studies at University College London, where he debugged the Occupation Computer
programs of his fellow students in exchange for beer. While working programmer, author
for the Ericsson Computer Science Lab, he helped develop Erlang in Known for Creating the Erlang
1986. programming
language
Career Website joearms.github.io (http
s://joearms.github.io)
He received a Ph.D. in computer science from the Royal Institute of
Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden in 2003.[2] His
dissertation was titled Making reliable distributed systems in the presence of software errors.[3] He was a
professor at KTH since 2014.

Death
He died on 20 April 2019 from an infection which was complicated by pulmonary fibrosis.[4][5][6][7]

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Joe Armstrong (programmer) - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Armstrong_(programmer)

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], 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.[8]

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
2007. Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World. Pragmatic Bookshelf
ISBN 978-1934356005.
2013. Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World. Second edition. Pragmatic Bookshelf
ISBN 978-1937785536.

References
1. Armstrong, Joe (29 April 2013). "Excerpts from Coders At Work: Joe Armstrong Interview" (http://ivory.idyll.
org/blog/coders-at-work-joe-armstrong.html). Living in an Ivory Basement (Interview). Interviewed by
Seibel, Peter. Brown, C. Titus. Retrieved 23 December 2017.
2. "Joe Armstrong: Father of Erlang" (http://www.erlang-factory.com/conference/ErlangUserConference2012/
speakers/joearmstrong). Erlang User Conference. Erlang Solutions Ltd. 2012. Retrieved 23 December
2017.
3. Armstrong, Joe (December 2003). Making reliable distributed systems in the presence of software errors
(https://web.archive.org/web/20041204143417/http://www.sics.se/~joe/thesis/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf)
(PDF) (PhD). Stockholm: Royal Institute of Technology. Archived from the original (http://www.sics.se/~joe/
thesis/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf) (PDF) on 4 December 2004.
4. "Francesco Cesarini on Twitter" (https://twitter.com/FrancescoC/status/1119596234166218754). Twitter. 20
April 2019. Retrieved 20 April 2019.
5. Wager, Kristjan (20 April 2019). "RIP Joe Armstong, the author of Erlang" (https://freethoughtblogs.com/kri
swager/2019/04/20/rip-joe-armstrong-the-author-of-erlang/). Free Thought Blogs. Retrieved 21 April 2019.

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Joe Armstrong (programmer) - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Armstrong_(programmer)

6. 作者： (21 April 2019). "Erlang之父Joe Armstrong去世" (http://tech.sina.com.cn/csj/2019-04-21/doc-ihvhie

wr7400471.shtml). 新浪科技_新浪网 (in Chinese). Retrieved 21 April 2019.
7. "Helen Taylor on Twitter" (https://twitter.com/mrsjoeerl/status/1119941783381774338). Twitter. 21 April
2019. Retrieved 24 April 2019.
8. Seibel, Peter (2009). "Joe Armstrong" (http://www.codersatwork.com/joe-armstrong.html). Coders at work.
Retrieved 23 December 2017.

External links
Erlang and other stuff (https://joearms.github.io/) - Joe Armstrong's current blog
Armstrong on Software (http://armstrongonsoftware.blogspot.com/) - Joe Armstrong's old weblog
Joseph Leslie Armstrong (https://www.kth.se/profile/jlarm/) - Prof. Armstrong's home page at KTH
Joe Armstrong (https://web.archive.org/web/20150905052657/https://www.sics.se/%7ejoe/) home page at
the Swedish Institute of Computer Science

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