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

Posted By: Charles | Oct 29th, 2007 @ 11:05 AM | 25,897 Views | 18 Comments
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.

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.

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.
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#Oct 29th, 2007 @ 11:26 AM
Chadk
Chadk
excuse me - do you has a flavor?
Finally. The interview i have looked forward to.

I had the pleasure to talk to mr. Armstrong. Hes really darn cool.
#Oct 29th, 2007 @ 12:33 PM
Laurens
Laurens
Hey Charles, Thanks again for this in-depth video! This is really the stuff I always love to see on Channel 9! Btw I like Erik Meijer. I saw him at the Microsoft Devdays in Amsterdam once. You can see he's really passionate about his work! (as are most people in the industry, I'm sure) ~Laurens
#Oct 29th, 2007 @ 1:06 PM
sylvan
sylvan
I just want to emphasize one of the key points here that I strongly agree with: The hardware change is NOT incremental, it's a massive paradigm shift, so it's a bit bonkers to think that we can just keep using the same old tools with slight changes.
#Oct 29th, 2007 @ 2:00 PM
TimP
TimP
The download link is currently broken. Sad
#Oct 29th, 2007 @ 2:19 PM
Charles
Charles
Welcome Change
TimP wrote:
The download link is currently broken.


Thanks. I will fix this.
C
#Oct 29th, 2007 @ 4:12 PM
JChung2006
JChung2006
Concurrency programming enthusiasts would do well to remember Amdahl's Law.

I'm really enjoying the notion of Java, C++, and C# programs being viewed as "legacy code" in the same manner that COBOL programs are viewed today.  This video was worth the sheer delight from realizing how true this will become!
#Oct 29th, 2007 @ 4:46 PM
Balclutha
Balclutha

Great video; Joe's a lively chap.

I wanted to let those who are interested know that they can watch a video of Joe’s Erlang presentation from the 2002 Lightweight Languages Workshop at http://ll2.ai.mit.edu/.

#Oct 29th, 2007 @ 10:28 PM
dot_tom
dot_tom

The JAOO 2007 series of Channel 9 interviews has been I think one of the most consistently interesting video sets I can remember on Channel 9. Ever. It's really wonderful to hear these alternative views and deep thoughts by folks not involved with The Mothership (tm).

Channel 9 is the example I always hold up whenever I want to point out to anti-MS zealots that Microsoft is not the company they used to be - I won't call them the bad old days, but certainly Microsoft today is far more open than when I started programming professionally 14 years ago.

Please continue to cover things like JAOO. Personally speaking I select my computing platform based on programming tools and with regard to that nothing touchs Windows. If we do transition into a virtualized / cloud centric OS world then I shall continue to apply my "follow the best dev tools" rule - and will look to Channel 9 to help me make that decision. Thank you Charles (and supporting team) for bringing these videos to us! Smiley

#Oct 30th, 2007 @ 2:46 AM
Chadk
Chadk
excuse me - do you has a flavor?
dot_tom wrote:


The JAOO 2007 series of Channel 9 interviews has been I think one of the most consistently interesting video sets I can remember on Channel 9. Ever. It's really wonderful to hear these alternative views and deep thoughts by folks not involved with The Mothership (tm).

Channel 9 is the example I always hold up whenever I want to point out to anti-MS zealots that Microsoft is not the company they used to be - I won't call them the bad old days, but certainly Microsoft today is far more open than when I started programming professionally 14 years ago.

Please continue to cover things like JAOO. Personally speaking I select my computing platform based on programming tools and with regard to that nothing touchs Windows. If we do transition into a virtualized / cloud centric OS world then I shall continue to apply my "follow the best dev tools" rule - and will look to Channel 9 to help me make that decision. Thank you Charles (and supporting team) for bringing these videos to us!


Unfortunately, JAOO is one of its kind. But its a bloody great event.

I, for one, want to go back to JAOO next year. The amount of different views is just awesome. And i think that the interviews so far have shown that people who do other things than microsoft, arent just zealots who try to flame microsoft at any point in time. And i think this is very important.

I hope that C9 will be on JAOO next year, its just makes very good interviews to have different views on things, from people who arent internet trolls.
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