Erlang Copied Scala's Actors & Erlang's VM is almost a Clone of the JVM

by Sadek Drobi on Apr 01, 2011 |

Erlang co-creators, Joe Armstrong and Robert Virding, have admitted that Erlang was heavily inspired by Java. In an interview at ErlangFactory 2011 SF, they confirmed (in video below) a long standing rumor that Scala Actors had heavily inspired their work in what they then called Erlang Processes. Moreover, they acknowledged the fact that Erlang's VM is barely a clone of the famous Java Virtual Machine.

Joe and Robert then mention design decisions they made and regret choosing dynamic over static typing for Erlang. They confirm that they started the implementation of turning the type system into a static one adding concepts like monads.

Erlang co-creators then promise that these changes will be released soon in a version that also gets rid of the current VM moving back to the well known JVM.

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It's 1st of April by Omkar Patil Posted

Re: It's 1st of April by Matthew Sackman Posted

Re: It's 1st of April by Gozo Smith Posted

you'll wish its the 1st of April by Spencer Cathey Posted

It's 1st of April by nicolae caralicea Posted

It's 1st of April by Omkar Patil

Happy April fool's day!

Re: It's 1st of April by Matthew Sackman

Erm, by the way, you may want to check out hg.rabbitmq.com/erlando/ and lists.rabbitmq.com/pipermail/rabbitmq-discuss/2...

Monads are here!

Re: It's 1st of April by Gozo Smith

it's obvious that Joe Armstrong is quite a bad lier, Robert Virding is much more convincing :)

you'll wish its the 1st of April by Spencer Cathey

Thanks for the fun! I just read about the Ford Sync rebooting. A programmer can easily imagine being only able to detect a bug and forcing a reboot as an expedient solution. Then I read further about new legislation requiring programmers to have professional engineering certificates before connecting nuclear power plants to the Internet with the mandated .NET components ;-)

It's 1st of April by nicolae caralicea

I just enjoyed it. It actually blew my mind firstly... They both looked so serious.
I am both Erlang and Scala fun and have a lot of respect for the Erlang and Scala's creators.
These two great languages have their own niches and I hope someday many dormant developers will wake up and start appreciating the values and the fun they can get by adopting them