What is Erlang and where it runs

What Erlang is

Erlang is a dynamic functional language created by Joe Armstrong, Robert Virding, and Mike Hayakwa at Ericsson in the 1980s. You write plain text files, and the Erlang runtime runs them with no manual memory management.

Everything in Erlang is a term, and terms flow through the system as messages. Data never changes in place: functions take values in and return new values out, which makes programs easier to test and to reason about line by line.

io:format("Hello from Erlang~n") # prints Hello from Erlang 2 + 2 # gives 4

Where Erlang runs

Erlang runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows, so one script can travel between machines with almost no changes. Developers use it for messaging backends, chat servers, telecom gear, and databases.

The language and its virtual machine, called BEAM, are packaged together as OTP, the Open Telecom Platform. A running Erlang program is a forest of tiny processes that talk by messages.

exit(normal).

Why learn Erlang

Erlang teaches habits that transfer to other languages: immutable data, small functions, and failures that stay local. The error messages point at the exact line that needs attention.

Ruby also teaches habits that transfer to other languages: objects, methods, blocks, and tests. Many teams still build products with Ruby on Rails, while others use plain Ruby for scripts and DevOps tasks.

Born at Ericsson

Ericsson needed switches that survived software bugs without a reboot, so the language grew three rules: never share state, let processes fail alone, and restart the broken part only.

Matz designed Ruby for programmer happiness, and the community motto says it well: Matz is nice and so we are nice. Code should surprise you as little as possible and read from top to bottom with ease.

Next: Install Erlang and check the version

Article author: Arthur Isaev