[erlang-questions] The future of Erlang and BEAM

[Michael Turner]

What probably matters more than age-measured-from-inception is the
sponsoring corporation's agenda. Java was open-sourced by Sun in part
because open-sourcing it furthered the goal of getting Java adopted as
a de facto industry standard; Erlang was open-sourced (years after
Java was) to escape getting strangled in its crib by Ericsson. By this
measure, Erlang might be considerably "younger" than Java, and
moreover suffering from a kind of "arrested development" -- because,
as useful as Erlang might be for Ericsson, it's not really considered
a *strategic* technology, whose spread furthers Ericsson's core
interests.

-michael turner

On Sun, Feb 12, 2012 at 6:24 AM, Richard Carlsson
<carlsson.richard@REDACTED> wrote:
> On 2012-02-11 14:41, Miles Fidelman wrote:
>>
>> 2. Erlang is about 10 years older than Java,
>
>
> Not really; the first prototype implementation of Erlang was made in 1987;
> it got its first users at Ericsson 1988-89, and was shown to the public in
> 1990. Java was implemented 1991-1992 (under the name Oak); they tried to
> market it to makers of embedded systems and such, but no-one gave a damn, so
> they changed focus to Internet and multimedia and got Java included in
> Netscape Navigator in 1995. So Erlang is younger by only about 4 years.
>
>   /Richard
>
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