Erlang's not about lightweight processes and message passing

Erlang’s not about lightweight processes and message passing… I used to think that the big idea of Erlang is its lightweight processes and message passing. Over the last couple of years I’ve realised that there’s a bigger insight to be had, and in this post I’d like to share it with you. Background Erlang has an interesting history. If I understand things correctly, it started off as a Prolog library for building reliable distributed systems, morphed into a Prolog dialect, before finally becoming a language in its own right. The goal seemed to have always been to solve the problem of building reliable distributed systems. It was developed at Ericsson and used to program their telephone switches. This was sometime in the 80s and 90s, before internet use become widespread. I suppose they were already dealing with “internet scale” traffic, i.e. hundreds of millions of users, with stricter SLAs than most internet services provide today. So in a sense they were ahead of their time. In 199 ... Read full article.