The first of this academic year’s distinguished lectures will be given by Professor Joe Armstrong, co-inventor of Erlang, on Monday 16th November 2015 at The Byre Theatre. The programme is as follows:
09:15 – 09:30 Introduction By Professor Kevin Hammond
09:30 – 10:45 Lecture 1 [Setting the scene: I’ll talk about the software landscape of the mid 80’s and discuss which problems we were trying to solve. I’ll talk about the early experiments that led to Erlang.]
10:45 – 11:15 Coffee Break – Refreshments provided
11:15 – 12:30 Lecture 2 [The middle years: I’ll talk about the enhancements we made to Erlang. How we added distribution and the bit syntax and so on. I’ll talk about company politics, building a community and about the obstacles to introducing a new technology.]
12:30 – 14:00 Lunch Break – Free time
14:00 – 15:15 Lecture 3 [WhatsApp and the future: I’ll talk about what happened after Erlang became open source and how this changed everything. I’ll talk about the explosive growth of Erlang which lead to adoption by WhatsApp.
I’ll also talk about the future. What are the challenges of the Internet of things? How can we make massively distributed systems that run forever?]
15:15 – 15:30 Q & A Session – Open forum