Channel 9 - Entries tagged with Erlang

YOW! 2011: Steve Vinoski - Riak Core, Erlang and Frisbee Freestyle

Charles — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 22:08:44 GMT

Steve Vinoski is an architect at Basho Technologies in Cambridge, MA, USA. He is a senior member of the IEEE and a member of the ACM. Steve is regarded as an expert in the areas of middleware and distributed computing systems, topics for which he has authored or co-authored over 80 articles, papers, and a book. He currently writes The Functional Web column for IEEE Internet Computing (IC) magazine, and prior to that, from 2002-2008, he wrote the Toward Integration column for IC as well.

Steve's session at YOW! 2011 focused on Riak Core, the distributed systems foundation for the Riak distributed database and the Riak Search full-text indexing system. It's implemented in Erlang, Steve's favorite language.

Besides being an expert in the domain of distributed systems and Erlang, Steve has been ranked among the top 100 Frisbee Freestyle players in the world. We talk about this, too, of course!

Steve's YOW! speaker page

PS: Sorry about the relatively low lighting (the LED light that sits atop my travel camera is not sufficiently suited to solve the low ambient light problem unless it blinds the interviewee... Travelling with larger lights might have to happen...). This sometimes happens in the dynamic on-location interviewing process (where dynamic implies the shoot locations change and depend upon what location is available at the time - in this case, we talked in the YOW! speakers room in Brisbane). The audio's great, though, as is the conversation, most importantly.

Thanks for joining us on C9, Steve! Keep on Erlangin' and Frisbee Freestylin'.

The YOW! Developer Conference offers outstanding opportunities to learn more about the latest practices, technologies, and methodologies for building innovative software solutions as well as the chance to meet and network with international software experts and other talented developers in Australia. Thanks to Dave Thomas and the event's excellent staff - Mary Catherine (MC), Lisa, Aino, Melissa, and others - for inviting me to this excellent pure developer event and thanks to all of the speakers for letting me take some of their time to record conversations for Channel 9. If you live in Australia, or aren't too far away, or just like to travel (who doesn't?), then you need to go to this yearly event. It's outstanding. There are many great developers down under. That's for sure. The speakers are exceptional—Dave and team set a high bar!

SPLASH 2011: Kresten Thorup - Erlang, Erjang, and Building Reliable Systems

Charles — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 19:14:06 GMT

Kresten Thorup is the CTO of Trifork, creator of Erjang (Erlang implementation running on the JVM), and implementer of Java generics. He is deeply interested in distributed systems programming and unusually capable at it (he mastered Erlang in a year, then won the Erlang User of the Year award in 2010). He's taken his Erlang knowledge and expertise in distributed computing to new heights in building highly reliable systems that scale (the most recent of which being the online patient registry for the Danish national health system). Kresten and his team at Trifork are also the folks behind GOTO (used to be called JAOO), a great developer conference and one of my personal favorites, actually. They are also involved with the QCon and YOW! events. Great stuff!

Here, we talk about what Kresten's been up to recently, Erlang, Erjang, software reliability, concurrency, and distributed systems. Tune in.

See Kresten's blog for further details on Erjang and more: http://www.javalimit.com/

Thanks for joining us on Channel 9, Kresten. Keep on pushing the envelope!

Recently, Channel 9 was invited to attend the great SPLASH conference. What is SPLASH? Systems, Programming, Languages and Applications: Software for Humanity. A big thanks to the SPLASH event organizers for inviting me and my camera to engage some key computer scientists and engineers in geeky, fun conversation! SPLASH is a great event! I learned a ton and met many amazing computer scientists and students.

SPLASH is an annual conference that embraces all aspects of software construction and delivery, and that joins all factions of programming technologies. Since 2010 SPLASH is the umbrella for OOPSLA and Onward! [source=splashcon.org]

JAOO 2007: Joe Armstrong - On Erlang, OO, Concurrency, Shared State and the Future, Part 2

Charles — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 19:59:00 GMT

Often, after the camera is turned off, the conversation continues and, on occasion is truly interesting. Of course, as you could image, Joe, Erik and I continued to chat about concurrent programming, functional languages, the future of hardware-software interaction, etc, when I turned the camera off after part 1 of this interview with the creator of Erlang, Joe Armstrong.

Rather than let the conversation evaporate into the ether of time and space, I decided to turn the camera back on and record a second part. I am sure glad I did!

This time around, Erik Meijer sits down in the other hot seat and we embark on a fascinating conversation about the future of programming in an increasingly, from a modern hardware + software perspective, concurrent world.

Joe is outspoken on the topic of objects and mutable shared state, as you know from part 1 of this interview (and if you understand Erlang, obviously). He's also got some really interesting ideas on programmable hardware...

In this interview, you will also learn what got the great Erik Meijer interested in programming and languages. It's a really interesting story.

Tune in. This is another compelling conversation with some of the industry's most innovative thinkers. Enjoy!

Joe Armstrong is the principle inventor of the Erlang programming Language and coined the term "Concurrency Oriented Programming". He has worked for Ericsson where he developed Erlang and was chief architect of the Erlang/OTP system.

In 1998 he left Ericsson to form Bluetail, a company which developed all its products in Erlang. In 2003 he obtain his PhD from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. The title of his thesis was "Making reliable distributed systems in the presence of software errors." Today he works for Ericsson.

JAOO 2007: Joe Armstrong - On Erlang, OO, Concurrency, Shared State and the Future, Part 1

Charles — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 18:05:00 GMT

I recently got the chance to attend JAOO in Aarhus, Denmark. Besides learning a great amount about various approaches to solving hard problems that we all face as programmers (regardless of the stack we spend most of our time developing on), I got to meet so many interesting people from all walks of programmer life.

He is author of the book Software for a concurrent world: (Pragmatic Bookshelf - July 15, 2007). He is married with 2 children, 2 cats and 4 motorcycles and would very much like to sell his Royal Enfield Bullet and replace it with a Norton Commando.

Mads Torgersen is a Senior Program Manager in the C# group and has been working on the design of LINQ and other new C# language features. Before joining Microsoft, Mads worked as an associate professor in computer science at the university of Aarhus, where he was part of the group that developed wildcards for Java generics.

Here, in part one of a two part interview, Joe and Mads discuss the pros and cons of object oriented programming, the new spotlight on concurrency and the future of languages (it should come as no surprise, for those of you who understand Erlang, that Joe is not a big time proponent of OO...). Erik Meijer, who is listening into the conversation will appear at random intervals to add his usual brilliant perspective.

This is a fantastic discussion. Listen in and learn from some of programming's masters. This was a real treat for me and one of the highlights of my time at JAOO.