
AstonJ
The Erlang Rationale, by Robert Virding (PDF)
This article was written by @rvirding …over a decade ago! Posting here in case anyone else finds it of interest and adding it to our Erlang portal’s list of pinned threads
Here’s an update from Robert about why he wrote this article (from EF):
Edit May 2021: Be sure to check out Robert’s interview here too - he talks about the Erlang Rationale and quite a bit more!
Most Liked

DevotionGeo
It pointed me to ‘A History of Erlang’ by Joe Armstrong and the first sentence is “Erlang was designed for writing concurrent programs that “run forever””.

AstonJ
Nice one DG!
Here’s the same PDF I think:
And the slides from the page you posted:
https://dl.acm.org/action/downloadSupplement?doi=10.1145%2F1238844.1238850&file=erlang.pdf
They also have a downloadable video:
https://dl.acm.org/action/downloadSupplement?doi=10.1145%2F1238844.1238850&file=m6-armstrong-h.mov
Popular Backend topics










Other popular topics










Latest in Backend
Latest (all)
Categories:
Popular Portals
- /elixir
- /rust
- /wasm
- /ruby
- /erlang
- /phoenix
- /keyboards
- /js
- /rails
- /python
- /security
- /go
- /swift
- /vim
- /clojure
- /java
- /haskell
- /emacs
- /svelte
- /onivim
- /typescript
- /crystal
- /c-plus-plus
- /tailwind
- /kotlin
- /gleam
- /react
- /flutter
- /elm
- /ocaml
- /vscode
- /opensuse
- /centos
- /ash
- /php
- /deepseek
- /scala
- /zig
- /html
- /debian
- /nixos
- /lisp
- /agda
- /sublime-text
- /textmate
- /react-native
- /kubuntu
- /arch-linux
- /revery
- /ubuntu
- /manjaro
- /django
- /spring
- /diversity
- /lua
- /nodejs
- /c
- /julia
- /slackware
- /neovim