Jon Udell has an interesting session with Steve Burbeck (who's only apparent career blemish appears to be the design of UDDI 8^). [Update:
Burbeck's history goes back to that Tektronix Smalltalk community here in Portland that spawned Ward Cunningham, Kent Beck, Rebecca Wirfs-Brock, Gemstone Smalltalk, Digitalk Smalltalk, etc. The work Cunningham, Burbeck, and others did at Wyatt with a Smalltalk-based trading system is a gold mine of ideas barely tapped, yet more relevant than most enterprisey systems built since.
Someone could write a book on Tek Labs and the direct and indirect influence it had not just in popularizing Smalltalk, but design patterns, agile programming, etc. It's reach is far and wide and largely unrecognized.
Back to Burbeck... the current references are to his work on multi-cellular computing. Apoptosis is an increasingly recorgnized pattern, e.g. from the Erlang community the idea that small components should give up quickly and allow a higher-order component handle the fault.
Stigmergy is interesting... it's not really found in Erlang, except I guess it is in a sense what the Mnesia distributed database is for. It's also a key aspect of the Linda tuple spaces / Javaspaces model, and the idea of "blackboards" in artificial intelligence.
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It is not at the Erlang language level per se. Support for it is part of the process management API which is used in nearly every Erlang application.
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