The Erlang Language

Erlang is a general-purpose concurrent programming language and runtime system. The sequential subset of Erlang is a functional language, with strict evaluation, single assignment, and dynamic typing. Concurrency was built into the Erlang language from the start, and all Erlang programs follow the same share-nothing, scalable and fault-tolerant actor-style concurrency model. For this reason, Erlang is generally thought to be best language in the business for concurrency-oriented programming.

Creating and managing processes is trivial in Erlang, whereas threads are considered a complicated and error-prone topic in most languages.

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.