20 years of industrial functional programming

It is now 20 years since the Ericsson Computer Science Laboratory (CSLab) was formed, and 20 years since CSLab started performing the programming language experiments that eventually led to the development of the Erlang programming language. For 15 years, Ericsson has conducted experiments with Erlang in an industrial setting, and for 12 years, actual commercial products have been developed.This talk summarizes some of the lessons learned from this work. It is well known that it is difficult to introduce a new programming technology. Even so, engineers often fail to realize that the reasons for resisting change are more often social/political than technical, even though the objections may seem technical in nature. This talk will highlight a few of the common objections to Erlang, and measure them against practical experience. In addition, it will suggest some topics for research that could result in significant cost savings in the near future, as well as inspire closer cooperation between industry and academia.