Erlang Introduction
I will be using this blog to share what I have learned about the Erlang programming language. I wanted to learn more about a functional programming language and the more I looked into Erlang, and seeing that it is used in telecoms, the more I wanted to learn about it. This is a short video I found from StoneRiverELearning on YouTube.
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According to this video Erlang is a functional programming language known for its concurrency and fault tolerance. The trait of concurrency means that the language is capable of running multiple processes at once along with the trait of fault tolerance which allows Erlang applications to keep running despite some programs crashing. Erlang also has the characteristic of self-healing, which allows it to swap code in during the time that an application is up and running. The language was created by Ericsson, a company developing cell phones, in the 1980’s. Cell phone companies were required to keep in mind the concept of concurrency so it makes sense that the creation of the language came from that industry. The language was designed so that it would run systems that never went down, having an uptime of 99.99999% which is incredibly good. Erlang programs do crash but because the language uses the concept of processes working together and bringing each other back up again after crashing, the system does not go down. The language itself is dynamically typed, the data type is not declared, and does not have user defined data types, or classes. So the Erlang programming language is a functional, concurrency oriented programming language. I personally forked the github of Erlang OTP which is a set of open source Erlang libraries. I will continue to share what I learn about the language on my Medium.
