Hi everyone, and thank you for being here. As you can see, I decided to start a new blog about Erlang, a programming language that is gaining more and more interest not only in the IT world but in my heart too

This is my first post, but instead of writing a long intro, I would like to share with you some bits of history about the language. For the intros you can always read the About page.

Before starting, I invite you to take a look at the following video, in which you can see Joe Armstrong, Mike Williams and Robert Virding (and Bjarne Dacker in the first minute of the clip) explaining the reasons why their telecom system is so simple, but reliable and powerful.

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Nice, isn’t it? As you have just seen, they were using Erlang to implement a telecom system. They was working at Ericsson in those years and during the early 80s they were looking for a great programming language to solve some problems of systems that needed to be distributed, concurrent and fault tolerant. They was thinking about a language with scalability and reliability build inside of the language, but after long searches they understood that there wasn’t nothing like that. So that they decided to create a new programming language with those key features built inside itself. At the Ericsson Computer Science Laboratory they spent about 4 years prototyping and evolving the language that nowadays has been used in a lot of distributed systems across the world.

In my opinion (to be honest, not only mine) the focal point is that Joe and Company at the Ericsson Labs needed to solve a specific problem. That problem was not so common in those years, and they were focused on create something that was able to be different from the past experiences. So that, they got the insight of build those features directly inside of the language instead of build them at the top of it. This was a success for Ericsson but 20 years later it still remain a success for a growing number of developers not only in the telecom domain but in a large range of situations.

Erlang was released as Open Source in December 1998, and from then the community is still growing, the stable release of the language is the R14B. If you are not an “Erlanger” and you want to take a look without be forced to install the Erlang System on your machine, my advice is to visit TryErlang.org. On the site, you can go through some little but interesting tutorials and you can dive into this great language.

See you soon