Erlang Article

Introduction

Erlang is a general-purpose concurrent, functional programming language, and a garbage-collected runtime system.

It first appeared in 1986 and was designed by Joe Armstrong, Robert Virding and Mike Williams at Swedish company, Ericsson.

Features

Erlang is a mini operating system which runs ontop of another operating system.

It has a multi-server niche where it performs really well. It is in distributed applications and controlling a multi-node network.

Pros/Cons

Erlang has its pros and cons:

Pros	Cons
Monitoring systems that oversee and coordinate thousands of virtual machines	Web applications that don't involve real-time communications.
Distributed databases (CouchDB etc)	Computation heavy tasks
Service Oriented Software architectures	String operations; parsers, transformations etc
Stateful binary communications, like a protocol-aware load-balancer.	Desktop GUI applications

Extra Programs

Functional Programming Languages - Haskell, Java, Python, PHP, Clojure
Software Architectures
Database Programs - CouchDB, MariaDB, ArangoDB
Operating Systems - Windows, Apple, Linux

Sources

Summary

In conclusion:

Erlang is good for programming in functional terms and is very unique in that it can be used as a virtual operating system. This is quite useful if you need to use this feature whilst programming.