Thread: Erlang a programming language

Erlang, a programming lan¬guage originally created in 1987 by Ericsson in its Com¬
puter Science Laboratory isn't ex¬actly what anyone would call 'new', let alone the next big thing.

In fact, it's so old that many of you may have never heard of it till now ei¬ther. So then, just why and how can a 20-year-old language suddenly become the next big thing?



The answer, lies in the many features of Erlang, with one in particular - con¬currency, or the built-in ability to run a program over a cluster of machines, even those of different platforms, which makes it easy to scale your applications to support any number of users or transactions almost instantly.
Now, combine that with the support for fault-tolerance, non-stop applica¬tions and hot code replacement and you
might get an idea why Erlang could be very attractive for web and software ap­plications in use today.
In fact, Erlang is already demon­strating that power, moving from pow­ering a real-time telecom application for an ATM switch like AXD30 1 from Erics­son, to a real-time chat application for Facebook.com, which supports over 70 million users.
Another real example is Yaws, short for Yet Another Web Server, a web server coded in Erlang. This server, in a bench­mark test, held on even with 80,000 par­allel requests, when Apache died at just over 4,000 parallel sessions.
All that power comes from the fea­tures of Erlang, like these: