Erlang is a programming language explicitly designed for building robust, distributed, soft real-time, distributed systems.

Erlang programs are built from a large number of communicating parallel processes. These processes share no memory and communicate by pure copying message passing.

This model of programming is easy to understand, is scalable and functions well in the presence of errors. There is no shared memory and the programs have no locks so Erlang programs can easily be parallelised and run on multicore computers.

Inside an Erlang process lurks a functional programming language with a dynamic type system.

This talk highlights the Erlang view of the world - showing how we can model the world using concurrent processes, and how we can program these processes in a simple functional language. We'll also look at some of the commercial areas where Erlang is being used and see what kind of problems are best suited to the Erlang approach.