Erlang Creator Joe Armstrong Has Died

Rogers Cadenhead (Slashdot reader #4,482) writes:

Joe Armstrong, the computer scientist best known as one of the creators of the Erlang programming language, died Saturday. Erlang Solutions founder Francesco Cesarini shared the news on Twitter and said, 'His work has laid the foundation which will be used by generations to come. RIP @joeerl, thank you for inspiring us all.'

Erlang was created by Armstrong, Robert Virding and Mike Williams at the Ericsson telecom company in 1986 and became open source 12 years later. It is known for functional programming, immutable data, code hot-swapping and systems that require insanely high levels of availability.

In another Tweet, Cesarini asks people to share their own memories of Armstrong -- ' funny, enlightening or plain silly.' And
Ulf Wiger, who describes himself as an Erlang old-timer, remembered giving a talk about how to avoid projects dominated by mediocrity. 'I used Joe as an example of a 'brilliant developer, but hard to fit into a regular project.''

Joe had replied, 'I am very EASY to fit into regular projects! It's just that so few projects are regular...'

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