Joe Armstrong (programmer)

Joseph Leslie Armstrong (27 December 1950 – 20 April 2019) was a computer scientist working in the area of fault-tolerant distributed systems. He is best known as one of the co-designers of the Erlang programming language.

Armstrong was born in Bournemouth, England in 1950.

At 17, Armstrong began programming in Fortran on his local council's mainframe.

Armstrong graduated with a B.Sc. in Physics from University College London in 1972.

He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden in 2003. His dissertation was titled Making reliable distributed systems in the presence of software errors. He was a professor at KTH from 2014 until his death.

After briefly working for Donald Michie at the University of Edinburgh, Armstrong moved to Sweden in 1974 and joined the Ericsson Computer Science Laboratory at Kista in 1984.

Peter Seibel wrote:

It was at Ericsson in 1986, that he worked with Robert Virding and Mike Williams, to invent the Erlang programming language, which was released as open source in 1998.

Armstrong married Helen Taylor in 1977. They had two children, Thomas and Claire.

Armstrong died on 20 April 2019 from an infection which was complicated by pulmonary fibrosis.

• 2007. Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World. Pragmatic BookshelfISBN 978-1934356005.
• 2013. Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World. Second edition. Pragmatic BookshelfISBN 978-1937785536.

• Erlang and other stuff - Joe Armstrong's current blog
• Armstrong on Software - Joe Armstrong's old weblog
• Joseph Leslie Armstrong - Prof. Armstrong's home page at KTH
• Joe Armstrong home page at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science