Erlang developments

The language was invented in 1986 by Joe Armstrong at Ericsson. As a major telecommunications company, Ericsson originally used Erlang for its telephone switching systems and to improve telephony application development. The full potential of Erlang was not obvious yet at that time; the situation changed much later.

In 1998, Erlang was open-sourced, which greatly expanded its use. It went on to power WhatsApp and to support the development of GPRS, 3G and LTE mobile networks. Armstrong famously said Erlang is "write once, run forever", and wrote:

"Erlang uses concurrent processes to structure the program. These processes have no shared memory and communicate by asynchronous message passing. Erlang processes are lightweight and belong to the language, not the operating system. Erlang has mechanisms to allow programs to change code 'on the fly' so that programs can evolve and change as they run."

That explains a lot about Erlang's current resurgence: a technology that flew under the radar for a long time has turned out to be a great fit for many modern applications.

Our client is a well-known industrial pump manufacturer. They wanted a module that would send SMS alerts automatically to customers whenever one of their devices became dysfunctional or broke down.

The service we built was based on the Twilio API and coded in Erlang. The SMS module was successfully integrated into the client's software stack.