Erlang is a functional programming language developed at Ericsson for the implementation of concurrent, distributed, fault-tolerant systems. In 1998 Erlang was released as Open Source. Today Erlang is used by Ericsson and many other companies (T-Mobile (UK), Swedish Telecom and many smaller start-up companies such as e.g. LambdaStream in A Coruña, to develop industrial applications (for example, a high-speed ATM switch developed at Ericsson, parts of Facebook chat, Apache CouchDB - a distributed, fault-tolerant and schema-free document-oriented database accessible via a RESTful HTTP/JSON API, users at Amazon, Yahoo!, etc.) with challenging requirements on software reliability and overall system availability.
Since 2010, I organize periodic meetings in Madrid, also known as Madrid Erlounges, to talk about Erlang. Please subscribe to the madrid-erlang-users mailing list here to keep informed of these meetings.
To improve the reliability of Erlang programs we have developed McErlang, a model checker for Erlang. In contrast to most other Erlang verification attempts, we provide support for virtually the full, rather complex, programming language. The model checker has full Erlang data type support, support for general process communication, node semantics (inter-process communication behave subtly different from intra-process communication), fault detection and fault tolerance, and crucially can verify programs written using the high-level OTP Erlang component library (used by most Erlang programs).