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Erlang Programming/History
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History
The Erlang language was first written in Prolog by Joe Armstrong.Audio interview with Joe Armstrong from (http://www.se-radio.net) Joe is a known fan of Prolog and borrowed much syntax from Prolog in the design of Erlang. This first Prolog version of Erlang was slow and motivated the creation of a virtual machine. Later an emulator called the BEAM (Bogdan's Erlang Abstract Machine) was written in C and is about 200,000 lines of code. It is thought that Erlang is both a reference to mathematician Agner Krarup Erlang and short for "Ericsson Language", due to its place of birth. Mailing list discussion, 1999 (https://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/1999-February/000098.html)
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