Treffer: Functional Programming the Long Road to Enlightenment: a Historical and Personal Narrative

(en)This talk outlines developments in programming from the beginning of programming (in 1948) to today. In particular I'll talk about the development of Erlang and about the trends in programming that lead to Erlang and what these trends mean for the future. Work on Erlang started in 1985, so we'll turn the clock back to 1985 and see what the world looked like then. C++, Java, Haskell, Javascript, Ruby, Python and Perl had yet to be invented. Most people believed, incorrectly as it turned out, that Ada and PL/1 would dominate the future. But I was more interested in Prolog and Smalltalk. Prolog was the answer, but I didn't know what the question was. I'll talk about how we grew a programming language, and what the main factors were in spreading the language. I'll relate my personal experience with Erlang to broader developments in programming and try to see how the two fit together. I'll also take a peep into the future and speculate about where computing is going.