Introduction to Erlang: History, Features, and Use Cases of the Language

Introduction to Erlang: History, Features, and Use Cases of the Language

Erlang is a programming language developed in the early 1980s by Joe Armstrong of Ericsson. It is popularly used for developing distributed, fault-tolerant, soft real-time, and non-stop applications. Its design focuses on concurrency, scalability, and fault tolerance, making it an ideal choice for telecoms, banking, e-commerce, computer telephony, and instant messaging systems.

History of Erlang

Erlang was originally designed and developed by Joe Armstrong at the Ericsson Computer Science Laboratory in the late 1980s. In 1995, the language was made open source and its development moved to the Open Telecom Platform (OTP). Since then, Erlang has become one of the most successful languages in the telecom industry. With the help of the OTP, Erlang was able to provide scalability, robustness, and very high reliability.

Features of Erlang

Erlang is a concurrent, functional, and general-purpose programming language. It supports hot swapping, which allows code to be changed without stopping the system. It is a dynamic language with a flexible type system and dynamic code loading. Erlang also supports pattern matching, list comprehensions, and first-class functions. Some of the other features include built-in support for distributed computing, garbage collection, and error handling.

Uses Cases of Erlang

Erlang is used for developing high availability applications for distributed systems. It is ideal for mission-critical systems that require fault tolerance and scalability. It is also used for developing embedded systems, such as those in automotive and avionics industries. Due to its scalability and concurrency features, Erlang is also used for building web applications, webservers, chat services, and other distributed systems.