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Since their origin in telecommunications, Erlang and its VM have gone a long way. But everything that we think of as great was set in motion more than 20 years ago, through the power of permissive design and good decision making.
In this article, we are going to look at the origins of Erlang, how it enables the functional programming paradigm and the actor model.
Together with you, we will also look into the BEAM: the abstract machine that powers Elixir and Erlang, and how it allows software engineers to focus on business logic instead of the computational plumbing.
Finally, we’ll talk about the emergence of Elixir with its cleaner and leaner standard library, easier metaprogramming, and the best web framework known to humankind.
First off, though, a brief venture into computer games.
High-performance entertainment
Video games have always utilized the capabilities of computers to their fullest degree. Take the first popular game: Spacewar. It used the advanced input handling of PDP-1 to allow two players to battle in outer space.
