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==History==
The name ''Erlang'', attributed to Bjarne Däcker, has been presumed by those working on the telephony switches (for whom the language was designed) to be a reference to Danish mathematician and engineer [[Agner Krarup Erlang]] and a [[Abbreviation#Syllabic abbreviation|syllabic abbreviation]] of "Ericsson Language".<ref name="hopl"/><ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/1999-February/000098.html |title=Erlang, the mathematician? |date=February 1999 }}</ref><ref>{{cite web |url=https://foldoc.org/Erlang |title=Free Online Dictionary of Computing: Erlang }}</ref> Erlang was designed with the aim of improving the development of telephony applications.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://erlang.org/course/history.html|title=History of Erlang|website=Erlang.org}}</ref> The initial version of Erlang was implemented in [[Prolog]] and was influenced by the programming language [[PLEX (programming language)|PLEX]] used in earlier Ericsson exchanges. By 1988 Erlang had proven that it was suitable for prototyping telephone exchanges, but the Prolog interpreter was far too slow. One group within Ericsson estimated that it would need to be 40 times faster to be suitable for production use. In 1992, work began on the [[BEAM (Erlang virtual machine)|BEAM]] virtual machine (VM), which compiles Erlang to C using a mix of natively compiled code and [[threaded code]] to strike a balance between performance and disk space.<ref>{{cite book |last=Armstrong |first=Joe |chapter=The development of Erlang |title=Proceedings of the second ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming |journal=ACM SIGPLAN Notices |date=August 1997 |volume=32 |issue=8 |pages=196–203 |doi=10.1145/258948.258967 |isbn=0897919181 |s2cid=6821037 }}</ref> According to co-inventor Joe Armstrong, the language went from
[[File:Robert Virding and Joe Armstrong, 2013.jpg|thumb|Robert Virding and Joe Armstrong, 2013]]
In February 1998, Ericsson Radio Systems banned the in-house use of Erlang for new products, citing a preference for non-proprietary languages.<ref>{{cite thesis|url=https://cogsys.uni-bamberg.de/team/schmid/uoshp/lehreuos/fp01-www/fp-referate/erlang/bjarnelic.pdf#page=45|title=Concurrent Functional Programming for Telecommunications: A Case Study of Technology Introduction|first=Bjarne|last=Däcker|date=October 2000|publisher=Royal Institute of Technology|page=37}}</ref> The ban caused Armstrong and others to make plans to leave Ericsson.<ref name="questions"/> In March 1998 Ericsson announced the AXD301 switch,<ref name="hopl"/> containing over a million lines of Erlang and reported to achieve a [[high availability]] of [[nines (engineering)|nine "9"s]].<ref>
{{cite web |url=http://www.rabbitmq.com/resources/armstrong.pdf |title=Concurrency Oriented Programming in Erlang |date=9 November 2002}}
</ref> In December 1998, the implementation of Erlang was open-sourced and most of the Erlang team resigned to form a new company, Bluetail AB.<ref name="hopl"/> Ericsson eventually relaxed the ban and re-hired Armstrong in 2004.<ref name="questions">{{cite web |url=http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2006-July/021368.html |title=question about Erlang's future |date=6 July 2010}}</ref>
In 2006, native [[symmetric multiprocessing]] support was added to the runtime system and VM.<ref name="hopl"/>
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