Re: A language idea: Elle

[Luke Gorrie <address@hidden>]

Michael Vanier <mvanier@cs.caltech.edu> wrote:
> ISTR from the Erlang presentation at LL2 (BTW thanks for the webcast!),
> that Ericsson is trying to move away from Erlang for some reason and
> replace it with C++.  If so, that's not very encouraging.

There's certainly been a bunch of big-company politics in Erlang's
past, though that's before my time. The "Backlash" section of Bjarne's
thesis has some details of that stuff.

But Erlang's grown a long way outside Ericsson these days, and has a
healthy future independently. Ericsson are still the biggest users and
main developers, but it's all completely open-source and lots of other
companies are using and contributing to Erlang too. Already many of
the core Erlang developers have moved on from Ericsson and continue to
work on and with Erlang from all over the place.

Here at Nortel we do a lot of Erlang. In particular our
SSL-accelleration and switched firewall internet appliances are built
with Erlang, and sell for piles of money (as I understand it.) We'll
release another 2-3 major Erlang-based products this year.

BTW, at the Erlang User Conference (a couple of weeks after LL2) the
"disruptive technology" aspect came across really strong - there were
a lot of presentations from small (e.g. 2-3 person) groups building
solid software very quickly and doing well for themselves. At least
one of them was working under contract to Ericsson too :-), the guys
who did a Bluetooth-based system in Erlang for routing calls between
desk/mobile/voicemail in the European Parliament building (so nobody's
phone rings in the voting room etc :-))

Cheers,
Luke