Erlang Programming/History

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History

The Erlang language was first written in Prolog by Joe Armstrong.[1] Joe is a known fan of Prolog and borrowed much syntax from Prolog in the design of Erlang. This first Prolog version of Erlang was slow and motivated the creation of a virtual machine. Later an emulator called the BEAM (Bogdan's Erlang Abstract Machine, [1]) was written in C and is about 200,000 lines of code. It is thought that Erlang is short for "Ericsson Language", due to its place of birth.

References

  1. Audio interview with Joe Armstrong from (http://www.se-radio.net)