Erlang is my favourite language from the ones I've used! (which admittedly aren't that many) RIP Joe Armstrong :( He left us way too soon Many of his talks, lectures, Q&A's were recorded. Interesting stuff. Joe graduated with a physics degree, got a phd in CS and worked on writing software for aerospace / satellite applications for a few years if I remember correctly before joining Ericsson where he devised Erlang together with Robert Virding and Mike Williams. Robert Virding is still active in the erlang community and he is an avid language implementer. His academic background is in mathematics. He's a big Lisp fan and implemented one on core erlang.