Erlang is a *(distributed), _(fault-tolerant), _(concurrent|concurrency) *(functional) *(programming language) developed by Ericsson. It is worth noting that Ericsson considered both _(Lisp) and _(Prolog) for a project, and opted to create Erlang themselves instead. For over 10 years it has been used in real-life telecommunication applications, but is now expanding to other areas.

The whole development environment and documentation is now available as open source <a href="http://www.erlang.org">erlang.org</a>, and with lots of goodies such as <a href="http://erlang.org/doc/r8b/lib/mnesia-4.0.2/doc/html/index.html">distributed databases</a>, <a href="http://erlang.org/project/megaco/index.html">multimedia gateways</a> , and the first <a href="http://www.erlang.org/download/erlang-book-part1.pdf">half of the book</a>.

Research projects to compile Erlang into something faster than its traditional byte code include <a href="http://www.csd.uu.se/projects/hipe/">Hipe</a> and <a href="http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~etos/">ETOS</a>, the Erlang to _(Scheme) compiler.

Major open source projects developed in Erlang include <a href="http://www.wings3d.com">Wings 3D</a> a polygon mesh modeller, and <a href="http://yaws.hyber.org">Yaws</a>, an incredibly fast web server.

The Erlang programming paradigm is sometimes marketed as "Concurrency-Oriented Programming", which is essentially equivalent to *(Actor)s.

<ul class="links">
<li>The open source _(Erlang site| http://www.erlang.org).
<li>Ericsson's _(Erlang site| http://www.erlang.se), offering licensing and support.
<li>_(Erlang Consulting and Training| http://www.erlang-consulting.com).
<li>_(The Open Directory area for Erlang| http://dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/Erlang/).
<li>_(Erlang Projects| http://www.erlang-projects.org).
<li>_(Erlang programmation| http://www.eyrolles.com/php.informatique/Ouvrages/ouvrage.php3?ouv_ean13=9782212110791): French Erlang book (may 2003)
<li>_(Erlang/OTP Professional Services by S&T| http://www.erlang-services.com): Courses, consultants etc.
</ul>
