Erlang was born in the 1980s at Ericsson with a clear goal: to build telecom systems that never crash. The result is a language designed for concurrency, distributed systems and the ability to update code on the fly without restarting - like changing a car engine while it’s running at highway speed.

Erlang uses an actor‑style model where thousands of lightweight processes communicate via message passing. That makes it excellent at handling massive traffic and many concurrent users - which is why it powers systems like WhatsApp, RabbitMQ and CouchDB.

The syntax may feel unusual at first, but once you get used to it it’s hard to go back. Erlang provides a solid foundation for building robust, scalable systems and still attracts developers who want durable solutions for the long term.