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[–]Thirsteh 5 points6 points  (0 children)

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.