Joseph Leslie Armstrong (27 December 1950 – 20 April 2019) was a computer scientist working in the area of

fault-tolerant Fault tolerance is the property that enables a system to continue operating properly in the event of the failure of one or more faults within some of its components. If its operating quality decreases at all, the decrease is proportional to the ...

distributed systems A distributed system is a system whose components are located on different networked computers, which communicate and coordinate their actions by passing messages to one another from any system. Distributed computing is a field of computer sci ...

. He is best known as one of the co-designers of the

Erlang programming language Erlang ( ) is a general-purpose, concurrent, functional programming language, and a garbage-collected runtime system. The term Erlang is used interchangeably with Erlang/OTP, or Open Telecom Platform (OTP), which consists of the Erlang run ...

Early life and education

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. A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Science was the University of ...

Physics Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge which r ...

from

University College London , mottoeng = Let all come who by merit deserve the most reward , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £143 million (2020) , budget = ...

in 1972. He received a

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...

Computer Science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includi ...

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 KTH may refer to: * Keat Hong LRT station, Singapore, LRT station abbreviation * Kent House railway station, London, National Rail station code * KTH Royal Institute of Technology, a university in Sweden * KTH Krynica, a Polish ice hockey team * Khy ...

from 2014 until his death.

Career

After briefly working for

Donald Michie Donald Michie (; 11 November 1923 – 7 July 2007) was a British researcher in artificial intelligence. During World War II, Michie worked for the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, contributing to the effort to solve " Tunny ...

at the

University of Edinburgh The University of Edinburgh ( sco, University o Edinburgh, gd, Oilthigh Dhùn Èideann; abbreviated as ''Edin.'' in post-nominals) is a public research university based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Granted a royal charter by King James VI in 15 ...

, Armstrong moved to Sweden in 1974 and joined the Ericsson Computer Science Lab at

Kista Kista () is a district in the borough of Rinkeby-Kista, Stockholm, Sweden. It has a strategic position located in between Sweden's main airport, the Stockholm-Arlanda International Airport and central Stockholm, and alongside the main natio ...

in 1984. Peter Seibel wrote:

Originally a physicist, he switched to computer science when he ran out of money in the middle of his physics PhD and landed a job as a researcher working for
Donald Michie Donald Michie (; 11 November 1923 – 7 July 2007) was a British researcher in artificial intelligence. During World War II, Michie worked for the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, contributing to the effort to solve " Tunny ...
—one of the founders of the field of artificial intelligence in Britain. At Michie's lab, Armstrong was exposed to the full range of AI goodies, becoming a founding member of the British Robotics Association and writing papers about robotic vision. When funding for AI dried up as a result of the famous
Lighthill report __NOTOC__ ''Artificial Intelligence: A General Survey'', commonly known as the Lighthill report, is a scholarly article by James Lighthill, published in ''Artificial Intelligence: a paper symposium'' in 1973. Published in 1973, it was compiled by ...
, it was back to physics-related programming for more than half a decade, first at the
EISCAT EISCAT (European Incoherent Scatter Scientific Association) operates three incoherent scatter radar systems in Northern Scandinavia and Svalbard. The facilities are used to study the interaction between the Sun and the Earth as revealed by dist ...
scientific association and later the Swedish Space Corporation, before finally joining the Ericsson Computer Science Lab, where he invented Erlang.

It was at

Ericsson (lit. "Telephone Stock Company of LM Ericsson"), commonly known as Ericsson, is a Swedish multinational networking and telecommunications company headquartered in Stockholm. The company sells infrastructure, software, and services in informa ...

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.

Personal life

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

Death

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

pulmonary fibrosis Pulmonary fibrosis is a condition in which the lungs become scarred over time. Symptoms include shortness of breath, a dry cough, feeling tired, weight loss, and nail clubbing. Complications may include pulmonary hypertension, respiratory failu ...

Publications

* 2007. ''Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World''. Pragmatic Bookshelf . * 2013. ''Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World. Second edition''. Pragmatic Bookshelf .

References

External links

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

Joe Armstrong
home page at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science {{DEFAULTSORT:Armstrong, Joe 1950 births 2019 deaths British computer programmers British computer scientists Programming language designers Free software programmers Computer programmers Erlang (programming language) KTH Royal Institute of Technology alumni Scientists from Bournemouth British expatriates in Sweden