V · Craft & community

Joe Armstrong

1950–2019

Ericsson · co-creator of Erlang

Gave us

Erlang and OTP (1986). The "let it crash" philosophy of fault tolerance. Process supervision trees that have run telecom switches for decades at nine-nines availability.

The story

Designed Erlang to keep AXD301 phone switches running through hardware faults, software bugs, and live upgrades. The patterns he formalised — supervisors, GenServers, hot code reload — show up in every modern actor framework, from Akka to Elixir.

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Across the field

VII Joe Beda · Brendan Burns · Craig McLuckie Co-creators of Kubernetes at Google · Heptio · VMware · Microsoft VII Salvatore Sanfilippo (antirez) Independent · Redis Ltd. (until 2020) · now back to Redis VII Doug Cutting Cloudera (chief architect) · ex-Yahoo · co-creator of Hadoop · Lucene · Nutch VII Jeff Dean · Sanjay Ghemawat Google senior fellows · co-authors of MapReduce, Bigtable, Spanner, TPU VII Ryan Dahl Creator of Node.js · creator of Deno · independent VII Moxie Marlinspike Founder of Signal · cryptographer · former sailor VII Geoffrey Hinton · Yann LeCun · Yoshua Bengio 2018 Turing laureates · the deep-learning trio I Claude Shannon Mathematician at Bell Labs · MIT

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