Erlang is a functional language, dynamically typed and uniquely assigned. The dynamic typing of other languages will sound familiar to you, but surely the unique assignment sounds Martian to you, the latter consists in that once a value has been assigned to a variable, it cannot change. And you will think: What good are variables that are invariable? Some variables, constants? Well, it has its advantages (such as not producing errors because a variable has taken a value that it should not) and you forget about the disadvantages or rather the customs that you bring from other less consistent languages.
But let’s see the characteristics of which it boasts:
▸Concurrent
Erlang applications support a large number of concurrent processes, which do not share memory and communicate by means of messages between them.
▸Distributed
An erlang virtual machine is a node. An erlang distributed system is a network of nodes whose processes can intercommunicate exactly the same as they would if they shared a node. That is why it is easy to set up several nodes, even on different machines, and our application would work the same as if it were running on a single processor.
▸Sturdiness
One of the maxims of erlang says: Let it fail. Processes can be configured in a way that can be shunted between nodes and migrated to nodes that have recovered. Some processes can monitor others and act on consequences when a process fails.
▸Soft real-time
Erlang supports systems that require reaction times on the order of milliseconds.
▸Quick code update
You can modify the code that is running without stopping the system.
▸External interfaces
Erlang processes can communicate with libraries and other code, made in other languages, with the same mechanism that is used internally between processes.
This lenguage uses concurrent processes to structure the program. These processes do not have shared memory and communicate through asynchronous message passing. Erlang processes are lightweight and belong to the language, not the operating system.
Until 1990, Erlang was featured in ISS’90, resulting in several new users, for example, Bellcore. Using a Prolog-based virtual machine (VM), the lab spent four years prototyping telecommunications applications with an evolving language that, through trial and error, became the Erlang we know today.
Ericsson made the decision to release Erlang as open source in December 1998 using the EPL license, a derivative of the Mozilla Public License. This was done without a budget or press releases, or with the help of the corporate marketing department. A year before the new millennium, the Erlang programming language site had approximately 36,000 page impressions. Ten years later, this number had risen to 2.8 million. This increase is a reflection of a growing community as a result of a combination of successful commercial projects all driven by the need to solve software problems in the domain for which Erlang was originally created.
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