Erlang (programming language)

Erlang (UR-lang) is a general-purpose, concurrent, functional programming language, as well as a garbage-collected runtime system.

The term Erlang is used interchangeably with Erlang/OTP, or OTP, which consists of the Erlang runtime system, a number of ready-to-use components mainly written in Erlang, and a set of design principles for Erlang programs.The Erlang runtime system is known for its designs that are well suited for systems with the following characteristics:

Distributed

Fault-tolerant

Soft real-time,

Highly available, non-stop applications

Hot swapping, where code can be changed without stopping a system.The Erlang programming language is known for the following properties:

Immutable data

Pattern matching

Functional programmingThe sequential subset of the Erlang language supports eager evaluation, single assignment, and dynamic typing.

It was originally a proprietary language within Ericsson, developed by Joe Armstrong, Robert Virding and Mike Williams in 1986, but was released as open source in 1998. Erlang/OTP is supported and maintained by the OTP product unit at Ericsson.