>in turn Erlang was heavily inspired by Smalltalk. That is not correct. Joe Armstrong in his paper The Development of Erlang says this; The design of Erlang w

>in turn Erlang was heavily inspired by Smalltalk. That is not correct. Joe Armstrong in his paper The Development of Erlang says this; The design of Erlang was heavily influenced by ideas from the logic and functional programming communities. Other sources of inspiration came from languages such as Chill and Ada which are used in industry for programming control systems. We concluded that we would like something like Prolog with added facilities for concurrency and improved error handling. No such language existed at the time. By about 1988 is was clear that Erlang as it was now called was a good language for prototyping telephone exchanges [10]. It was a strange mixture, with declarative features (inherited from Prolog), multi-tasking and concurrency (inherited from EriPascal and Ada) and an original combination of error handling mechanisms.