Erlang is the programming language developed at Ericsson that introduced lightweight processes for telecommunications systems.
Joe Armstrong, Robert Virding, and Mike Williams created Erlang at Ericsson in the 1980s. The language was intended for systems that had to run continuously, handle many simultaneous activities, and recover from failures.
Erlang processes are lightweight and communicate by sending messages rather than sharing ordinary mutable memory. Its “let it crash” philosophy uses supervision trees to isolate failures and restart affected components.
Erlang became associated with telephone switches, messaging systems, and other distributed services. Elixir runs on the same BEAM virtual machine and uses Erlang’s runtime, but Elixir is a separate language with different syntax and tooling.