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Joe Armstrong

Co-creator Erlang

Joe Armstrong is a retired computer scientist. He got his grey hairs inventing Erlang, starting a few companies, writing a few books, doing some research and teaching people to program.

Past Activities

Joe Armstrong / Jeremy Ruston
Code Mesh LDN 2018
09 Nov 2018
13.30 - 14.15

Intertwingling the Tiddlywiki with Erlang

Ted Nelson, who coined the term "Hypertext" also coined the lesser known word "Intertwingled" - this captures the idea that all there is, is knowledge which is tangled up and linked together in a myriad of complex ways.

Computer scientists think that we can organise knowledge in a systematic way but Nelson thought this was impossible. All there is is knowledge and links.

A Tiddlywiki is a self-contained system that organises data in a non-hierarchical manner allowing it to be read and authored in a non-linear manner.

This talk will go through the evolution of hypertext, following the evolution of ideas from Vannevar Bush to Ted Nelson and thence to the World Wide Web.

Our goal is to extend the boundaries of the Tiddlywiki to a larger distributed system, that's where Erlang comes in.

We'll talk about the problems encountered in turning small consistent data collections of dense knowledge into larger distributed systems with sparse knowledge.

OBJECTIVES

Stimulate discussion and make people think

Joe Armstrong
Code BEAM SF 2018
16 Mar 2018
09.05 - 09.50

The Forgotten Ideas in Computer Science

In the early days of computing there were many good ideas that were 'before their time' and for one reason or another, these ideas were dropped!

As time passes, perhaps we should revisit some of these ideas.

What were the good ideas that we have dropped?

Which ideas should be resurrected?

What were the silly idea of the past and what can we learn from these?

In this talk, I'll visit ideas, old and new and see how they relate to the current needs of our community and our current work.

I'll probably also rant on about Erlang and Elixir and how they can be used to solve some of the ideas that we have forgotten about.