"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.)
Erlang! Delighted you chose this. I knew it first as a measure of network capacity and then later learned about the language. Thank you for filling in the history.
Among Erlang developers, the Erlang ban was initially devastating. But the Erlang projects were relatively few and small, so your average developer in Ericsson wouldn't really have heard of Erlang and saw the ban as a just a reasonable decision to use standard tools (C++, UML, CORBA) instead of messing around with weird stuff cooked up in lab.
The ban almost certainly catalysed the decision to open-source Erlang, and that was a clear win for everyone involved with Erlang.
Probably the most dramatic effect of the ban was that a bit over half of Ericsson's computer science laboratory, including Joe Armstrong, quit and founded Erlang-driven 'Bluetail', which became an overnight success in the dotcom bubble.
"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.)
Couple of mistakes: "Just as Rails on Rails built on Ruby";
"At the time of the acquisition Erlang employed only 35 engineers."
Erlang! Delighted you chose this. I knew it first as a measure of network capacity and then later learned about the language. Thank you for filling in the history.
User 'jabl' on Hacker News had a reasonable take on some of the politics involved in the ban:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36570765
Among Erlang developers, the Erlang ban was initially devastating. But the Erlang projects were relatively few and small, so your average developer in Ericsson wouldn't really have heard of Erlang and saw the ban as a just a reasonable decision to use standard tools (C++, UML, CORBA) instead of messing around with weird stuff cooked up in lab.
The ban almost certainly catalysed the decision to open-source Erlang, and that was a clear win for everyone involved with Erlang.
Probably the most dramatic effect of the ban was that a bit over half of Ericsson's computer science laboratory, including Joe Armstrong, quit and founded Erlang-driven 'Bluetail', which became an overnight success in the dotcom bubble.