I had heard of him but because no one uses Erlang where I live it was kind of easy to ignore. I wish I hadn’t though.

Watching some of the talks he’s given on the problems of software in the wake of his death has been a real eye opener. The physics approach to building a language which tries to break the laws of physics as little as possible is truly brilliant.

I don’t know how much time and effort we could have saved ourselves from wasting if we’d gone with Erlang’s take on concurrency and messaging, but it’s a lot. Just today I scheduled a meeting where we need to talk about how to handle messages not making it all the way through a few REST-based sevices.

I doubt we’ll start using Erlang though, it’s just too risky when you can’t hire anyone, but you do feel a little stupid fighting problems Joe solved before your youngest hires were born.