I’m not very creative with names which makes me respect a name with an interesting background, twist or hidden meaning.  

Since I met Martin Logan, a colleague at Orbitz, and listened to what he had built with Erlang and how passionate he was about the language I’ve kept my ears open for Erlang news and stories.  I even dabbled with writing a bit of Erlang and working through Programming Erlang from The Pragmatic Programmers. But I always thought the name Erlang was a contraction of Ericsson Language giving credit to its heritage of being developed internally at Ericsson.

But tonight I learned it is not.  Or at least not entirely.

Since reading Release It! at the Orbitz Book Club I’ve followed Michael Nygard’s blog for the very practical advice he gives on operationalizing systems.  I spent a portion of my afternoon working through some capacity planning numbers to prepare for a site launch.  Thinking Michael might have some interesting insights I opened up his blog in NetNewsWire and was happy to see a new post to read before digging in to the archives.  But how appropriate when I saw the subject was using Erlang models for capacity planning.

It is a great article and something I’ll hopefully be able to put in to practice.  Scaling and capacity planning is somewhat of a black art.  If anyone thinks they have a clear approach to removing the mystery there are lots of people who would enjoy seeing Size It! on The Pragmatic Programmers list of titles.

But it was all too coincidental that a Danish telephone engineer named A. K. Erlang developed capacity planning models for early phone networks and the switches produced by Ericsson which scale so well and have minimal downtime have largely attributed  the success to having been written in Erlang.  Of course Wikipedia gives some insight into this and even has a citation to back it up:

“Erlang is named after A. K. Erlang. It is sometimes thought that its name is an abbreviation of Ericsson Language, owing to its origin inside Ericsson. According to Bjarne Däcker, who headed the Computer Science Lab at the time, this duality is intentional.”

December 1st, 2008 | technology