The Beam

Summary

Welcome to the first chapter of the “Elixir, 7 Steps to Start Your Journey” series. In my previous post, I discussed my journey with the programming language. In this chapter, we will discuss the Erlang Virtual Machine, the BEAM. To understand why the Elixir programming language is so powerful and reliable, we must understand its foundations, which means talking about Erlang. Elixir runs on the Erlang Virtual Machine and inherits many of its virtues. In this post, you will learn a little about the history of Erlang, the objective with which it was initially created, and why it is fundamental for Elixir. What is Erlang? Erlang as a programming language Erlang is a programming language created in the mid-1980s by Joe Armstrong, Robert Virding, and Mike Williams at the Ericsson Computer Science Laboratory. Initially designed for telecommunications, it is now a general-purpose language. It was influenced by other programming languages, such as ML and Prolog, and was released as open-source in 1998. Erlang was designed with distributed, fault-tolerant, massively concurrent, and soft real-time systems in mind, making it an excellent choice for today’s systems. Most are looking for these features, in addition to having confidence in Erlang’s history in productive systems. Some of the characteristics of this programming language are: It is a declarative language, which means it is based on the principle of describing what should be calculated instead of how. Pattern matching is possible at a high level and also on bit sequences. Functions in Erlang are first-class data. Erlang as the development ecosystem Up to this point, we have referred to Erlang as the programming language; however, it should be noted that Erlang can also refer to an entire development ecosystem that is made up of: The Erlang programming language The framework OTP A series of tools and The virtual machine, BEAM Erlang, as an ecosystem, was explicitly created to support highly available systems, which pr...