The reason Erlang (and Elixir) are interesting are not the languages themselves (although Elixir is a very nice language in my opinion), but the runtime behind them, BEAM.
The BEAM is the brainchild of the excellent engineers at Ericsson, the product of decades of R&D into building performant, scalable and reliable software for their telephony products.
It scales like a dream, runs your application on all available cores with no trouble at all, handles massive amounts of concurrent requests without breaking a sweat. The programming techniques it enables with projects like Phoenix LiveView are unique and powerful.
What's the license for the BEAM runtime? I've found that Erland and Elixir are both Apache License, but I can't find out whether the bytecode they generate can be executed in a fully open source environment.
IIRC Joe Armstrong said he was puzzled why people latched on to the term "BEAM" so much, and he preferred that it was simply referred to as the Erlang VM.
The BEAM is the brainchild of the excellent engineers at Ericsson, the product of decades of R&D into building performant, scalable and reliable software for their telephony products.
It scales like a dream, runs your application on all available cores with no trouble at all, handles massive amounts of concurrent requests without breaking a sweat. The programming techniques it enables with projects like Phoenix LiveView are unique and powerful.