COMP4075 Guest Lectures

Autumn 2020


Francesco Cesarini: Erlang, WhatsApp's Secret Sauce

Friday 27 November 2020, 11:00–12:30; On Zoom

Abstract: Erlang is a programming language designed for the Internet Age, although it pre-dates the cloud (and the Web). It is a language designed for multi-core computers, although it pre-dates them too. It is a “beacon language”, to quote Haskell guru Simon Peyton-Jones, in that it more clearly than any other language demonstrates the benefits of concurrency-oriented programming.

In this talk, Francesco will introduce Erlang from behind the trenches, looking at how through simplicity, its history influenced its constructs. He will be doing so from a personal prospective, with anecdotes from his time as an intern at the Ericsson computer science lab at a time when the language was being heavily influenced and later when working on the OTP R1 release.

Bio: Francesco Cesarini is the founder and technical director of Erlang Solutions Ltd, the professional services company focused on the Erlang ecosystem. He started his career with the inventors of Erlang at Ericsson's computer science laboratory. From there, he has architected, programmed and supported turnkey Erlang based solutions all over the world, from Telecoms, Messaging and Payment Switches to Blockchain. He co-authored 'Erlang Programming' and 'Designing for Scalability with Erlang/OTP' both published by O'Reilly and lectures at Oxford University.

The meeting will take place on Zoom. If you have not used Zoom before, I recommend installing and testing the Zoom Client before the lecture.


Last updated 27 November 2020.