Joe Armstrong Obituary

Joe Armstrong, who has died aged 68 from complications related to pulmonary fibrosis, was a computer scientist and one of the creators at Ericsson of the programming language Erlang, used by companies as diverse as Bet365, WhatsApp and Cisco. It was Joe’s idea to write a book on the language – Concurrent Programming in Erlang (co-authored with Michael Williams and Robert Virding, 1992) – rather than just an internal manual for the company, as a precursor to the language being released as open-source in 1998. He worked for a few years at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science (2001-04), receiving his PhD in 2003 for a thesis that dealt with the error-handling mechanism in Erlang, then returned to Ericsson, where he stayed until 2015.

Source: www.theguardian.com