The Evolution of Erlang

Hey Erlangers and Elixir Alchemists! 🧙‍♂️

We are happy to announce our next meetup with the following agenda. 📅

Agenda:

1. Péter Szeredi - The 7-11 wonders of Prolog
   I will first give a brief overview of my nearly 60 years of involvement in programming, mathematical logic and Prolog. 🧮 Next, I will present some simple Prolog example programs, demonstrating how to solve relatively complex programming tasks declaratively, via "executable specifications". 💾 I'll also talk about the notion of variable in Prolog (the so-called logic variable), and its role in making Prolog code more compact and more efficient. 📈 Finally I'll give a brief mention of some Prolog extensions: coroutining, constraint programming on rationals, and constraint programming on finite domains.
2. Robert Virding - The Evolution of Erlang
   The Erlang language and the way it could be used to build systems evolved over time. 🕰️ When designing Erlang, we were aiming to be able to improve the way of programming telecom applications in such a way as to meet all the requirements. 📞 Our understanding of the problem itself and how it should be handled evolved as we were developing Erlang. 🔄 I will show why we developed a new language, how we worked when developing, and try to explain how it attacked the problem. 🛠️ While Erlang itself is not a logic language, we actually used Prolog when we were developing Erlang. 🧠
3. Open discussion on Erlang topics. 💬

Speaker’s bio:

• Péter Szeredi is a professor at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME). Péter was one of the pioneers of the Prolog programming language: in 1975 he implemented the second Prolog implementation worldwide. This gave rise to quite a few experimental Prolog applications in Hungary in the late 1970's. From 1978 Péter led the development of MProlog, the first commercial implementation of Prolog, one of the few Hungarian software products of that period that were sold in the west. Between 1987 and 1990 he worked in the UK, in David H.D. Warren's group, developing multiprocessor implementations of Prolog. In 1990, after his return to Hungary, he joined the software company IQSOFT, where he led various Prolog related international projects, in part supported by EU and US agencies. Péter has been lecturing at BME since 1993, his topics include logic programming, constraint technologies and the semantic web. He served as a General Chair/Program Co-Chair at four large Prolog conferences. Péter is one of the fifteen recognized researchers in logic programming who, back in 1997, were bestowed the title "Founder of Logic Programming".
• Robert Virding is Principal Language Expert at Erlang Solutions Ltd. While at Ericsson, Robert was one of the original members of the Ericsson Computer Science Lab, and co-inventor of the Erlang programming language. He took part in the original system design and contributed much of the original libraries, as well as to the current compiler. While at the lab he also did a lot of work on the implementation of logic and functional languages and on garbage collection. He left Ericsson to become an entrepreneur and was one of the co-founders of Bluetail, the first Erlang startup, later acquired by Nortel Networks. Robert worked a number of years at the Swedish Defense Materiel Administration (FMV) Modeling and Simulations Group before joining Erlang Solutions. He co-authored the first book (Prentice-Hall) on Erlang, and is regularly invited to teach and present throughout the world.

What to bring:

• Your interest, questions and your good mood. 🤔😊

Important to know:

• Keep your RSVP up to date so we would know the size of our audience! ✅