Dynamically typed, functional language built for soft-real-time, fault-tolerant distributed systems (Ericsson, 1986). Concurrency via lightweight isolated processes that communicate only by message passing — the actor model in production.
Key facts
Year / creator: 1986, Joe Armstrong et al. at Ericsson.
Paradigm: functional + actor-model concurrency.
Typing: dynamic, strong.
VM: BEAM; preemptive scheduling of millions of processes.
“Let it crash” + supervision trees for fault tolerance.