A follow-up to the Erlang talk from 25.11.

[Adam Krupicka]

Hi,

I was intrigued by the fact that some of the original Erlang creators were
originally physicists (as mentioned at the yesterdays talk) and decided to
investigate further. And what better way than asking one of the men in question
themselves? :) An unedited exchange between Robert Virding and me follows:

22:06:17 ⤷ | rvirding: did you study physics?
22:06:38 ⤷ | before working on erlang
-- Thu, 26 Nov 2015 --
01:24:03 @rvirding | osense: yes, a long time ago I was studying for a PhD in
| physics, theoretical physics no less. Then I discovered
| programming.
01:24:09 ⤷ | you too?
07:19:45 osense | rvirding: haha no, however I am taking an introductory class
| to quantum mechanics this semester
07:20:56 ⤷ | I was at a talk about erlang yesterday and it was mentioned
| that two of the creators of erlang were originaly phisicists
07:21:41 ⤷ | and how that might have possibly affected some of the
| languages philosopbies
07:22:20 ⤷ | such as no direct sharing and message passing
10:57:02 @rvirding | osense: Yes, both Joe and I were physicists before we got into
| programming. IIRC Mike was an engineer, I can't remember which
| sort
10:58:07 ⤷ | I don't think our physics past had much influence
10:59:38 ⤷ | It was much more our thoughts on the "best" way to solve the
| telecom problem. There were hard requirements about
| concurrency and fault-tolerant systems and timing constraints
| (non-blocking)
11:01:42 ⤷ | Processes came from other intenral language and from operating
| systems. Crashing processes was a nice way of handling (some)
| errors but this required isolated processes to be safe. This
| also went back to OSes where processes are isolated and
| crashable etc.
11:04:09 ⤷ | Maybe you could say that the development was much more an
| engineering project than a CS research project. We were out to
| "solve the problem" rather than develop new CS ideas. We did
| develop new CS ideas but they were rather tools than goals.


Cheers,
A. K.

[Hynek Vychodil]

Hi,

I'm trying to recollect what was telling Mike Williams at EUC 2010 Stockholm.

If I remember correctly Mike Williams mentioned he was shortly working on HAARP in Australia as a mechanical engineer.

But I can't find any more info about it. He does not mention it in his short resume for SFBay2012 Erlang Factory (http://www.erlang-factory.com/conference/SFBay2012/speakers/MikeWilliams)

Mike is originally from South Wales, but has in fact lived in Sweden longer than he has anywhere else.
 
Way back in the 1960's after working as a Atheistic Missionary in Malawi, Mike went to Cambridge where he learnt a lot about drinking beer and rather less about "Mechanical Sciences". He then moved to Sweden in 1970 (guess why :-) and joined Ericsson as a hardware designer. The price of beer in Sweden being horrendously expensive enabled Mike to concentrate more on other things, He joined with Bjarne Däcker to found the Ericsson Computer Science Laboratory 1980

Pichi