Seven Languages in Seven Weeks

Chapter 6Erlang

Do you hear that, Mr. Anderson? That is the sound of inevitability.

Agent Smith

Few languages have the mystique of Erlang, the concurrency language that makes hard things easy and easy things hard. Its virtual machine, called BEAM, is rivaled only by the Java virtual machine for robust enterprise deployment. You could call it efficient, even brutally so, but Erlang’s syntax lacks the beauty and simplicity of, say, a Ruby. Think Agent Smith of The Matrix.^[15]

The Matrix was a 1999 science-fiction classic that painted our current world as a virtual world, created and maintained with computers, as an illusion. Agent Smith was an artificial intelligence program in the matrix that had an amazing ability to take any form and bend ...