Remembering Joe Armstrong: Visionary Behind Erlang and His Timeless Wisdom

On April 20, the Erlang community mourned the passing of Joe Armstrong, the creator of Erlang, at age 68.

Francesco Cesarini, co‑founder of Erlang Solutions, recalled Armstrong’s lasting impact on future generations.

Armstrong was born on 27 December 1950 in Burnham, England. He began programming in Fortran at 17, studied physics at the University of London, and pursued a PhD in high‑energy physics before moving to AI research with Donald Michie at the University of Edinburgh.

After UK government cuts to AI research, he worked in Sweden at EISCAT and the Swedish Space Agency, then joined Ericsson’s research lab in 1984 where he designed a new language based on Prolog – the birth of Erlang.

Erlang’s first official open‑source release came in 1986; Armstrong earned a PhD in computer science from KTH in 2003.

Armstrong summed up Erlang’s advantage in one sentence: “Write once, run forever.” The functional, concurrent language powers highly reliable telecom switches with availability of 99.9999999%.

He believed programming languages must be simple and easy to learn. His two key pieces of advice for developers were: 1) Think before you code and 2) Never write code when you are exhausted .

Armstrong also predicted that over the next two decades software critical to performance would merge tightly with hardware.

His legacy continues to inspire developers worldwide.