| Birth Date: | 27 December 1950 |
| Birth Place: | Bournemouth, England, UK |
| Alma Mater: | University College London, UK; Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden |
| Occupation: | Computer programmer, professor, author |
| Work Institution: | University of Edinburgh Ericsson Computer Science Lab KTH |
| Known For: | Creating the Erlang programming language |
| Spouse: | Helen Taylor |
| Children: | Thomas Armstrong, Claire Armstrong |
Joseph Leslie Armstrong (27 December 1950 – 20 April 2019) was a computer scientist working in the area of fault-tolerant distributed systems. He is best known as one of the co-designers of the Erlang programming language.
Armstrong was born in Bournemouth, England in 1950.[1] [2]
At 17, Armstrong began programming in Fortran on his local council's mainframe.[1] Armstrong graduated with a B.Sc. in Physics from University College London in 1972.[2]
He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden in 2003.[2] [3] His dissertation was titled Making reliable distributed systems in the presence of software errors.[4] He was a professor at KTH from 2014 until his death.[2]
After briefly working for Donald Michie at the University of Edinburgh, Armstrong moved to Sweden in 1974 and joined the Ericsson Computer Science Lab at Kista in 1984.[2]
Peter Seibel wrote:
Originally a physicist, he switched to computer science when he ran out of money in the middle of his physics PhD and landed a job as a researcher working for Donald Michie—one of the founders of the field of artificial intelligence in Britain. At Michie's lab, Armstrong was exposed to the full range of AI goodies, becoming a founding member of the British Robotics Association and writing papers about robotic vision.When funding for AI dried up as a result of the famous Lighthill report, it was back to physics-related programming for more than half a decade, first at the EISCAT scientific association and later the Swedish Space Corporation, before finally joining the Ericsson Computer Science Lab, where he invented Erlang.[5]
It was at Ericsson in 1986, that he worked with Robert Virding and Mike Williams, to invent the Erlang programming language,[2] which was released as open source in 1998.[6]
Armstrong married Helen Taylor in 1977. They had two children, Thomas and Claire.[2]
Armstrong died on 20 April 2019 from an infection which was complicated by pulmonary fibrosis.[7] [8] [9] [10]