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Introduction
Welcome to the introduction to Erlang Programming Language !!!!
If you want to advance your career in telecommunication, messaging, banking, e-commerce, etc. Then the Erlang programming language will be very helpful.
In this article, we will give you an introduction to Erlang. We will also discuss the benefits of using this language as it is not much popular. Further in this article, we will see the installation process of Erlang.
Erlang Programming language is a general-purpose general functional programming language. Robert Virding, Joe Armstrong, and Mike Williams developed Erlang in 1986. It was primarily developed to handle telephone switching systems. Later in 1998, it was made an open-source programming language. Erlang provides high availability and concurrency, scalability, and fault tolerance.
OTP(Open Telecom Platform) maintains Erlang. It also supports various ready-to-use components written in Erlang. OTP also consists of various design principles and Erlang runtime systems. After a brief introduction to Erlang let's discuss about OTP in brief.
Why Erlang?
Erlang is a programming language. It was developed for building scalable and fault-tolerant distributed systems. It was created by Ericsson, a telecommunications company, to support its telecom applications.
There are different reasons why Erlang is a popular choice for building distributed systems:
Erlang is designed to handle failures gracefully. It has a built-in mechanism for managing errors called “supervisors”. It can detect and recover from errors automatically. This makes it ideal for building systems that need to be highly available and reliable.
Erlang is designed to be highly concurrent. It can handle a large number of requests and processes simultaneously. This makes it ideal for building systems that need to scale to handle large amounts of traffic.
Erlang is optimized for low-latency and high-throughput systems. It has a lightweight process model. This model allows it to handle a large number of concurrent processes without incurring a significant performance overhead.
Erlang has a built-in message-passing mechanism. It allows processes to communicate with each other quickly and efficiently. This makes it easy to build distributed systems that need to exchange data between nodes.
What is Erlang good for?
Erlang is particularly well-suited for building systems that require high availability, concurrency, and fault tolerance. It has built-in support for lightweight processes (also known as "actors"). It also has a message-passing concurrency model. This model makes it easy to build systems that can handle large numbers of concurrent users.
There are some of the areas where Erlang is commonly used include:
Telecommunications: Erlang was initially developed by Ericsson for use in their telecommunications systems, and it is still widely used in this industry today.
Distributed systems: Erlang's built-in support for concurrency and message passing makes it a good choice for building distributed systems that need to scale to handle large numbers of users.
Web applications: Erlang's ability to handle high traffic loads and its built-in support for concurrency and fault tolerance make it a good choice for building web applications.
Gaming: Erlang's ability to handle large numbers of concurrent users and its fault-tolerant design make it a good choice for building online games and gaming platforms.
OTP(Open Telecom Platform)
OTP aimed at providing flexible and time-saving development for robust telecom systems. It consists of various ready-to-use components written in Erlang. It also consists of a set of design principles to aid Erlang programs. Erlang and OTP are closely related terms, so we use Erlang/OTP instead of OTP. The components of OTP are divided into five categories. These are:
Basic Application
Operations, and Maintenance
Interface and Communication
Database Management
Tools
Why should you use Erlang in your project?
Erlang Programming Language provides the following features:
Concurrency
Concurrency refers to the execution of many processes simultaneously. Erlang virtual machines use threads that work all across the CPU for communication.
Scalability
Scalability is the ability to handle the growing amount of load on the system. Scalability can be due to an increase in its user base or the addition of new functionality. Erlang Programming Language provides high scalability by adding more machines to an existing system.
Fault-Tolerance
The systems developed using Erlang Programming Language have high-fault tolerance. This property enables systems to keep working when a part of the system has some faults.
Hot Swapping
Hot-swapping functionality involves altering the code without interrupting program execution. This feature makes Erlang an interactive programming language.
High Availability
A characteristic that ensures the higher operational performance of systems. This feature helps in making good and easily accessible systems.
Reliability
Because of fault tolerance functionality, processes can be quickly restarted. Hence, the systems built using Erlang are self-healing systems. Also, Erlang Programming Language deals with many bugs to make systems more and more reliable.
Limitations of Erlang Programming Language
While Erlang is mainly used for telecommunication and messaging apps. It is not much used for other purposes.
Erlang has weak muscles, i.e., it can not handle real-time communication and heavy task.
Erlang is hard to deploy. It takes a lot of work to deploy Erlang applications for new developers.
Due to its nature, the debugging practices in Erlang are tough.
Erlang is not a popular language and has limited communities. There are very few Erlang Developers.
Uses of Erlang Programming Language
Erlang is used to develop systems that govern a third-party gateway.
It helps provide services like SMS alert services, where millions of messages are exchanged among users daily.
Erlang provides a fantastic messaging platform for creating large-scale messaging apps.
Also, it can handle enormous numbers of users on apps like Facebook, Whatsapp, and Wechat.
Erlang is also used in pattern matching.
Erlang is a well suite for developing fast and scalable applications.
It provides various binary protocols that help in binary manipulation.
Erlang is also a good choice while processing transactions from tons of places.
Erlang is also used in games. For example, Riot games developed a Riot messaging service using Erlang.
Klarna is a payment judgment startup. Its first version was written in Erlang.
Erlang's 'killer app' is now used as a real-time communication system.
What is Beam?
BEAM stands for Bogdan's Erlang Abstract Machine. It is named after its developer Bogumil Bogdan Hausman. It is an Erlang virtual machine, often confused with the Erlang runtime system(ERTS). It is used for executing user code in the Erlang runtime system. There are no preassumptions for processes, tables, ports, etc., in it. Not only Erlang but Elixir also operates on the BEAM. Along with an introduction to Erlang, let's discuss what Elixir is and how it differs from Erlang.
What is Elixir?
Elixir is a Ruby-like and an improved version of Erlang. It is an excellent combination of the syntax of ruby and Erlang functionalities. José Valim created Elixir in the early 2010s. It became popular in 2015-2016 when its main web framework ( Phoenix ) was released. Since then, it has been highly used in creating web applications. Although Erlang is quite helpful, but Elixir has become much more popular. This popularity is because of the advantages offered by Elixir.
Advantages of Elixir
Syntax
Elixir has a ruby-like syntax which is very easy to understand.
Boiler-plate code
Elixir improves the developer's productivity by removing some boiler-plate code.
Popularity
Out of Erlang and Elixir, Elixir is gaining more attention. And hence it is more up-to-date.
Web development
Phoenix, the most famous framework of Elixir. It provides various tools to ease your web development journey.
Well!! Before learning Elixir, you should have some experience working with Erlang. So, let's discuss the steps to download Erlang into your systems.
How to Download Erlang?
Hope you are clear with the introduction to Erlang and want to start working on it. But to start working with Erlang, you must install a fully-functional version. So now we will discuss how we can download Erlang into our systems. Ensure that you must meet the systems requirements before proceeding with the download. The required system requirements are:
Memory - 2 GB RAM (recommended)
Disk Space - No minimum requirement.
Operating System - Windows, Ubuntu/Debian, Mac
If you meet the system requirement, so you can proceed with the download.
Select a 64- or 32-bit installer according to your system.
After downloading, launch the installer, and click RUN.
Click NEXT without changing anything.
Select the installation path and proceed NEXT.
Click NEXT to accept the default start menu.
Click INSTALL.
Now after completing the installation, close this window.
Congratulations, you have successfully installed Erlang into your system.
Is Erlang worth learning?
Yes, Erlang is definitely worth learning. If you are interested in distributed systems and high-performance, fault-tolerant applications then Erlang is for you. Erlang is a programming language that was initially designed for telecom applications. It has since been used in various other domains, such as
Finance,
Gaming,
Healthcare, etc.
Erlang has a number of features that make it particularly well-suited for building distributed systems, including lightweight processes, message passing, and built-in support for concurrency and fault tolerance. These features allow Erlang programs to be highly scalable and resilient to failures.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Erlang easy to learn?
Erlang can be challenging to learn, especially for programmers unfamiliar with functional programming or distributed systems. The syntax of Erlang is quite different from that of more common programming languages like Java or Python, and the functional programming paradigm requires a different way of thinking about problem-solving.
Is Erlang better than Java?
If you are building a highly scalable distributed system with a need for high reliability and fault tolerance, Erlang might be a better choice. On the other hand, if you are building a general-purpose enterprise application with a need for cross-platform compatibility and a rich ecosystem of libraries and tools, Java might be a better choice.
Why is Erlang Programming Language not much popular?
Because of limitations like deployment difficulty, debugging, and not handling heavy tasks, it is not popular as other programming languages.
What are the advantages of the Erlang Programming Language?
Scalability, concurrency, availability, reliability, and fault tolerance are the advantages of developing Erlang applications.
What is Scalability?
Scalability can be defined as the ability to handle the growing amount of load on the system. Scalability can be due to an increase in its user base or the addition of new functionality.
Conclusion
This blog discussed an introduction to Erlang. Here we have discussed about the features and limitations of Erlang along with an introduction to Erlang. We also discussed the uses and complete process of downloading Erlang into your systems to use it. The article also consists of an introduction to Elixir after an introduction to Erlang, including its advantages.
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