Backtracking through Time and Space in Erlang

Erlang grew out of experiments in logic programming in the 80s, but very little of that heritage remains today. This talk revisits those early days to explore the ideas that were borrowed from Prolog, the ideas that were forgotten, and the ideas that we may yet revisit in the future.

We'll discuss the connections between the earliest implementations of Erlang and modern metaprogramming techniques, how Elixir's pipe operator relates to parsing, and what declarative programming can teach us about distributed shared memory. All of these ideas will come together in an exploration of how the BEAM ecosystem can leverage these techniques today to shape the way we might write code in the future!