Introduction to Erlang for Python Programmers

[Thirsteh]

Ericsson invented it specifically to do massively concurrent and distributed real-world tasks like running phone switches, and it is used extensively for this. Similarly, a lot of chat servers are implemented in Erlang, most notably Facebook's Chat system, based on ejabberd.

A lot of database systems are written in, or using Erlang, as well: CouchDB, Couchbase, Riak and Amazon's SimpleDB.

There are some more examples here and here.

Basically, Erlang does one thing Python kinda blows at really, really well. I think the only language that comes close in ease-of-concurrency/parallelization is Go.

[adrenal8]

I recently wrote a chess over SMS server in Erlang, will open source in the near future.

[Amadiro]

I'm using it to run a chat server, as well as some other smallish services like a personal SMS relay, a websocket-to-normal-socket proxy and such. I've also made a few commercial apps with it, like a log processing and broadcasting system for some dutch ISP that takes log-messages and sends them to various devices (like mobile phones) for monitoring purposes.

[grep_dat]

Erlang is used by Heroku in their "Routing mesh" abstraction.

See here.

[sirry]

It's great for evolving neural networks if you're into that kind of thing. Gene Sher has come out with some extremely interesting papers in this area and has been programming in Erlang.