Remembering Joe Armstrong: The Father of Erlang and His Impact on Distributed Systems

Joe Armstrong, born on December 27, 1950, was a pioneering computer scientist who invented the Erlang programming language while working at Ericsson's Computer Science Laboratory, becoming a world‑class expert in fault‑tolerant systems.

His academic background was in physics, but after working on AI research with Donald Michie and later on space research projects, he turned to software engineering, eventually leading the development of Erlang in 1986 for high‑availability telephone switching systems.

Armstrong earned a Ph.D. from KTH in 2003 with a dissertation on reliable distributed systems, which remains a valuable reference for concurrency research.

In 2016 he visited China for the SDCC conference, delivering talks such as “How to Design Highly Reliable Distributed Parallel Systems” and “Erlang and My Programming Life,” which helped boost the Erlang ecosystem in China; the presentation slides are still downloadable.

Erlang is a functional language with strong concurrency and fault‑tolerance, used in telecom and other high‑availability domains, achieving reliability levels of 99.9999999% in systems like ATM switches.

Armstrong emphasized that programming languages should be simple and easy to learn, and he offered two key pieces of advice to developers: think before you code, and avoid coding when exhausted, as tired programmers produce low‑quality code.

He also predicted that over the next two decades, performance‑critical software would increasingly merge with hardware.

The article concludes with a tribute to Armstrong’s lasting influence on programming and a list of reference materials, including interviews and articles about his life and work.