Erlang Programming/History

History

The Erlang language was first written in Prolog by Joe Armstrong. Joe is a known fan of Prolog and borrowed much syntax from Prolog in the design of Erlang. This first Prolog version of Erlang was slow and motivated the creation of a virtual machine. Later an emulator called the BEAM (Bogdan's Erlang Abstract Machine) was written in C and is about 200,000 lines of code. It is thought that Erlang is both a reference to mathematician Agner Krarup Erlang and short for "Ericsson Language", due to its place of birth.