Erlang and the Community

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.

Though all concurrency is explicit in Erlang, processes communicate using message passing instead of shared variables, which removes the need for locks.

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.

The Community

Erlang often receives praise for its friendly and knowledgeable user community. The erlang.org website is a natural first stop for finding new and old versions of Erlang, the online documentation, and the erlang-questions mailing list.

We provide additional community services through the TrapExit web, where you can find a multitude of discussion forums, user contributions and tutorials. We also arrange Erlang User Group Meetings in several cities on a regular basis, with interesting talks and inspiring conversations. The User Group Meetings usually end with an ErLounge - a friendly get-together over beer at some nearby pub.

We release some of our generic components as Open Source. We use these components ourselves in commercial products.

We also encourage our staff to write papers and present at conferences, and regularly sponsor Master's and PhD theses or take on interns - many of whom decide to stay with us.