Not really. Erlang was born out of practical experiments in language design with the explicit aim of finding a better way to program telephony applications. The experiments were done over a few years in the second half of 80s at the Computer Science Laboratory at Ericsson.
Joe's PhD thesis which describes the design decisions and Erlang's philosophy was published much later, at the end of 90s IIRC.
Joe's PhD thesis which describes the design decisions and Erlang's philosophy was published much later, at the end of 90s IIRC.