Joe Armstrong

Joseph Leslie Armstrong (27 December 1950 – 20 April 2019) was a computer scientist working in the area of fault-tolerant distributed systems. He is best known as one of the co-designers of the Erlang programming language. Early life and education Armstrong was born in Bournemouth, England in 1950. At 17, Armstrong began programming in Fortran on his local council's mainframe. Armstrong graduated with a B.Sc. in Physics from University College London in 1972. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden in 2003. His dissertation was titled Making reliable distributed systems in the presence of software errors. He was a professor at KTH from 2014 until his death.