Introducing Erlang

The name is strange, but the acronym for Ericsson Language that shares a name with a Danish mathematician somehow fits. Agner Karup Erlang was a huge name in the math behind telephone network analysis.

In 1986, Joe Armstrong developed the first version at Ericsson, continuing to develop and polish it through the last half of the decade. Through the 1990s, it grew in fits and starts and gained still more traction in the 2000s. It is the language behind CouchDB and SimpleDB, popular databases for cloud-based computing. Erlang also powers Facebook’s chat. The buzz for Erlang is growing steadily because it provides what many other languages can’t: scalable concurrency and reliability.

Built for Concurrency

Erlang is a product ...

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