Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Matthias's avatar

"In other words, Erlang was almost killed by the success of open-source languages."

Re-reading Armstrong's paragraph now, in 2023, I can see how you might think that, but it's not really what happened. Remember, this was 1998. The point about "proprietary language" in the Ericsson Radio decision was partially that you couldn't get a compiler from a competing vendor if you didn't like the one you had, and partially that you had to teach your developers Erlang yourself, since it wasn't widely used outside Ericsson. Open source wasn't big in Ericsson in 1998; typical tools were Solaris, Sun's C++ compiler, Clearcase version control, Sybase and Corba, or Microsoft's C++ compiler and NT.

(Source: I worked at Ericsson Radio in 1997, on a C++ project, and in 1998 and 1999 on Erlang and C-related things, including a year at Ericsson's Computer Science laboratory.)

Expand full comment
xnixx's avatar

Couple of mistakes: "Just as Rails on Rails built on Ruby";

"At the time of the acquisition Erlang employed only 35 engineers."

Expand full comment
9 more comments...

No posts