what is erlang

Erlang is a general-purpose, concurrent, functional high-level programming language, and a garbage-collected runtime system). It was designed with the aim of improving the development of telephony applications and is used in several large telecommunication systems from Ericsson). Erlang is also used in other sectors such as e-commerce, banking, and computer telephony. The language has built-in support for concurrency, distribution, and fault tolerance, making it suitable for building massively scalable soft real-time systems with requirements on high availability. The Erlang runtime system is designed for distributed and fault-tolerant systems). The term Erlang is used interchangeably with Erlang/OTP, or Open Telecom Platform (OTP), which consists of the Erlang runtime system, several ready-to-use components mainly written in Erlang, and a set of design principles for Erlang programs). OTP is a large collection of libraries for Erlang to do everything from compiling ASN.1 to providing a WWW server. Some of the uses of Erlang include telecoms, banking, e-commerce, computer telephony, and instant messaging. Erlangs main strength is support for concurrency, and it has a small but powerful set of primitives to create processes and communicate among them). The language is conceptually similar to the language occam, though it recasts the ideas of communicating).