Making Money From FP

Abstract

I believe that FPLs provide companies with a competitive advantage that can be used to out-compete companies using non FPLs. But life is not simple, in order to turn our ideas into money we can't just go and explain our latest fancy type systems to a venture capitalist and expect money to rain out of the sky - we have to do a lot more things.

In my talk, I'll talk about the "other things" that have to be done to get FP established and to earn money from the technology.

Spoiler: The 19$B WhatsApp acquisition by Facebook shows that not only can FP ideas earn money - but actually earn more money than in any other acquisition to date (WhatsApp messaging is programmed in Erlang :-)

Joe Armstrong

Joe Armstrong is the principle inventor of the Erlang programming Language and coined the term "Concurrency Oriented Programming". He has worked for Ericsson where he developed Erlang and was chief architect of the Erlang/OTP system.

In 1998 he left Ericsson to form Bluetail, a company which developed all its products in Erlang. In 2003 he obtained his PhD from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. The title of his thesis was "Making reliable distributed systems in the presence of software errors." Today he works for Ericsson, and is also Professor of Computer Science at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.