The Ericsson Computer science laboratory has designed a programming language called Erlang. Erlang is used to write real time languages for telephone exchanges and Network Switches. Erlang takes over many powerful features from the Miranda and concurrent clean for speed in execution. This language was developed to target the tele-communications industry in specific.
Erlang was named after the famous Danish Mathematician Agner Erlang, probably because the language itself has been written by Swedish Computer programmers and there fore they chose to name it Erlang or also possibly because of the program qualities.
Initially Erlang was developed for usage for Ericsson only. They owned the rights in full. But today Erlang is an open source language available for all since 1998. Telecommunication industry across countries can benefit from it.
HiPE or High Performance Erlang Project basically runs the virtual machine code on which the Ericsson implementation runs. Erlang has been developed at the Uppsala University and now it also supports interpretation-using E-script as of r11b-4.
Erlang is very similar to Java in usage because it uses the virtual machine and supports multithreading functionalities. The difference is that Java supports web applications and is used more to design the web applications, but Erlang is more for servers, communication languages and embedded systems. One more similarity between Erlang and Java is that both provide a garbage dumping system due to which the programmers do not have to worry about allocating memory space.
Client server design, state machines and thread supervision can all be done effortlessly because Erlang has pre designed templates or design patterns to help with. Erlang framework also supports distribution of programs across servers and serves as a cross platform for recovery, back up and automatic redistribution when pone server fails.
Erlang is an extremely dynamic and int6elligent language, which provides the programmers with concurrent data and can work with system components irrespective of the kind of data, it is provided with.
