Jump to content

Erlang Programming/History

From Wikibooks, open books for an open world

History

[edit | edit source]

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) was written in C and is about 200,000 lines of code. It is thought that Erlang is both a reference to mathematician Agner Krarup Erlang and short for "Ericsson Language", due to its place of birth. [2]

References

[edit | edit source]
  1. Audio interview with Joe Armstrong from (http://www.se-radio.net)
  2. Mailing list discussion, 1999 (https://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/1999-February/000098.html)