Erlang in 100 Seconds

Erlang is a functional programming language know for message-based concurrency model. Its BEAM virtual machine is still used by modern languages like Elixir and Gleam. Learn the basics of Erlang in this quick tutorial.
#programming #computerscience #100secondsofcode
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🔗 Resources
Erlang www.erlang.org
Elixir in 100 Seconds • Elixir in 100 Seconds
C in 100 seconds • C in 100 Seconds
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🔖 Topics Covered
- What is Erlang?
- Who created Erlang/OTP?
- Basics of Erlang
- Elixir vs Erlang
- Gleam vs Erlang
- What is the BEAM vm?
- How to get started with Erlang

[@h3w45]

Finally, something that isn't coming for my job

[@tortoiseshell_cat]

😂😂😂😂😂

[@JohnneyleeRollins]

Good, now compete to keep it 😅

[@NexusGamingRadical]

Bruh, this is the content I got used to.

[@bennythetiger6052]

W comment 😂😂

[@spec5delta259]

Underrated comment

[@TechyMage]

Adding "fluent in erlang" to my resume

[@GSBarlev]

That's something I would _really hate_ to get called on. "Oh, you're fluent in erlang? Great! You're now responsible for keeping this *extremely important* but ancient codebase from exploding! Here's your company pager-hope you don't believe in nights or weekends!"

[@yokaparthasarathy3294]

@@GSBarlevYou're supposed to burn the man not his soul

[@vaisakhkm783]

​@@GSBarlevAnd it's made by a really excited intern 30 years ago, held on by duck tape, hope, prayers and spaghetti code base regurgitated by the 30 years of maintainers who never cleaned up their technical dept.... with a great documentation that 20 years out of date and only seen by yahoo, not google..

[@geroutathat]

@@GSBarlevStop making out like its ancient not used. Its the power behind the biggest apps in the world. Facebook even tried to move to it but had trouble cross training as their coders had problems understanding stuff like tail end recursion. That ancient codebase will never explode, and it just looks like its being held together with tape from the outside, learn erlang from top to bottom and you will see the code is usually really good and solid.

[@flashingrowth]

@@geroutathat is it worth to learn it ??!

[@mahinchowdhury3995]

Guy 1: ""So what do you wanna call this language we made?" Guy 2:"Err.......lang ??...."

[@DavidJohnsson]

I think it was more like ERicsson LANGuage.

[@jtarchie]

Ericson, the telecom operator, was the main supporter for BEAM. Er(icson) Lang(uage).

[@akkesm]

Also Erlang as in the mathematician, Agner Krarup Erlang, known for his work in statistics and telecommunications.

[@hedwig7s]

Dang 3 people without a sense of humour

[@EliasWolfy]

r/woosh ☝️🤓

[@JohnneyleeRollins]

“Let it crash” - Joe Armstrong, economist

[@sirrobinofloxley7156]

Trump warns US voters of a 'bloodbath' if he loses presidential election Issued on: 17/03/2024

[@EpicNicks]

​@@sirrobinofloxley7156 Out of context misinfo

[@monkeytimesmagazine3725]

​@@sirrobinofloxley7156his a$$ is gonna look like a bloodbath after the election

[@AnthonyBullard]

Joe Armstrong was one of the GOATs. RIP Joe

[@akam9919]

@@sirrobinofloxley7156 i fail to see the relevance of trump comments to the original one. (also, probably completely out of context realistically speaking.)

[@fabilikesbutter9603]

Erlang so powerful, it turned 100 seconds into 163.

[@igorthelight]

That's because we awaited some tasks to finish! ;-)

[@AaaTeeEyeBee]

It was meant to be consumed in three concurrent blocks of 100sec. 🤷‍♂

[@vighnesh153]

If Math.floor( T / 100) == 1, then it is a 100 second video.

[@bendertherobot910]

Erlang executed tons of threads in your own mind and you didn't realise that yet...

[@Soul-Burn]

This is clearly a precursor to "Gleam in 100 seconds", considering it's recent 1.0 release.

[@apestogetherstrong341]

inferior version of erlang

[@Kats0unam1]

Gleam is kinda shit tho.

[@Soul-Burn]

Doesn't matter, it's currently getting clicks/views.

[@AaaTeeEyeBee]

*squeals* yes please!

[@tshwarelolebeko2395]

What's shitty about it?

[@pranaygaming4437]

A FireShip Video where u actually feel its calm and soothing in the tech world

[@ehza]

❤ exactly

[@none_the_less]

AI is still coming for your job.

[@aromaticsnail]

@@none_the_less not worry with my butt...it's my job I'm concerned

[@none_the_less]

@@aromaticsnail Edited. ;)

[@pooroldnostradamus]

@@none_the_lessWe're all going to die. But it's not exactly a useful allocation of our limited time to think about and lament it. It's sort of the same with imminent automation.

[@kipchickensout]

The syntax is crazy

[@baubi4260]

Bro decided to write phrases with his code lmao

[@cybroxde]

That's why Elixir exists.

[@nguyenhanh9479]

@@cybroxde Elixir syntax is not exactly easy to read either.

[@isodoubIet]

I mean it's fine really, at least it doesn't define blocks with indentation

[@kipchickensout]

@@isodoubIet true, that's the worst

[@devgoneweird]

Important thing about those processes is that they are very cheap to create and you can have lots of them at the same time. While it might sound unimpressive today, it did even 10-15 years ago, and this language is older than that.

[@mohitjain5552]

What?

[@geroutathat]

@@mohitjain5552 In the video they said you can create a process and then hang the process forever, so you might want to create a timeout. But the thing is, creating a process in erlang is cheap. You can create millions of them and leave them all hanging waiting and it wont crash your server. On a modern computer you could probably have billions of processes waiting. This can start getting chaotic even if it is acceptable code, so they use pools of processors and they queue calls to make it easier for our brains to understand exactly whats going on.... An example might be "server processes" you might start one for every single logged on person and leave it hanging until they log off, just waiting for them to do stuff. If your sever process crashes, no one else on the sytem is affected at all. If you have lets say 100 million users, and changing the name causes a crash, you can keep everyone online, have 1 million people crash, relaunch all them people instantly in a new server process, and update the running code without ever bringing the server offline. All of that is basically built into standard erlang. It is still impressive by todays standards. A company like facebook usually connects everyone to different computer servers, and if that server goes down, everyone on it goes down. WIth erlang 3 of the people connected to it could crash and the rest would be oblivious. For people who dont know erlang this can create code that looks like its being held together with tape and glue, they will get an error like "Okay 300 people cant send messages, whats going on?" and they look at the code and they cant figure it out, and indeed this is the hardest part of knowing erlang. For example an error you might find in Erlang would be an apple device is sending a packet to the server as ascii encoded, and your sever is pattern matching for binary. You and everyone else log on and its all working fine and you scratch your head.

[@julesoscar8921]

That is green thread right?

[@davidbriggs8109]

@@julesoscar8921not really

[@MultiMrAsd]

@@julesoscar8921 Its green threads, but it ensures that no thread can block or crash and prevent a switch between threads. It also separates the memory of all threads for more efficient GC.

[@blackjackjester]

erlang did define the very popular actor model, and even more so, the lightweight processes don't just scale to thousands, they scale into the millions. And that doesn't even count the built in support for passing messages between machines and supporting distributed systems through nearly invisible abstractions, and providing very capable distributed caching through ETS and basic persistence through mnesia db. OTP is an absolute monster of a platform. Its a shame it's so esoteric to so many people.

[@nikhilitty]

Syntax does take some getting used to, but it does get easier. And fun at times. That being said, I wish there were more jobs using the language- or at least, I can't seem to find too many. In my limited 2YOE, this has been the language I've worked with the most, and I find it a shame that I'll have to stick to more conventional options like Java or Python.

[@SJ-eu7em]

Some years back Ericsson still used it and Spotify as well, probably couple other Swedish companies where ex E/// people went

[@LtdJorge]

@@SJ-eu7emThere are some products written on it with companies behind them, like RabbitMQ, EMQx, CouchDB, Couchbase, Riak, etc

[@teknonmy7210]

@@nikhilitty all the jobs I've seen for Erlang require pretty high seniority, because most Erlang programmers with experience are very senior. Same thing with every obscure language I know

[@darrennew8211]

The whole "spawn and link" being atomic is really impressive, as is the ability to send functions over channels.

[@oakley6889]

Elixir is genuinely one of my favourite languages ever, I dont get to use it often, but it beautiful, thanks erlanngg

[@knightofrohan]

Do you know of any great resources to learn Elixir? I find the syntax so difficult

[@adamsilber-gniady6326]

@@knightofrohan exercism is great

[@ujulspins]

@@knightofrohan Read books. Unlike popular languages, the bulk of knowledge here is in books, not lessons on KZbin. Lists of these books are easy to find.

[@krateskim4169]

100 seconds of gleam, waiting for it , thank you in advance

[@samifouad]

⭐️!

[@MultiMojo]

Fun fact - Erlang still underpins the telecommunications systems that connect your phone to the cellular tower/base station and beyond.

[@metropolis10]

Let's not forget it STILL runs the worlds telecommunications software. Plenty of people still want data, txt, or calls on their phones out there!

[@TobbeEger]

Having worked with Erlang during my university days, and Elixir professionally, I would argue that the BEAM based programming languages offers the best model and support for concurrency out of every major language out there.

[@brachypelma24]

Now that you've done Erlang, Gleam would be a logical next topic for a 100-second video.

[@aus10d]

Erlang really intrigues me. And with Gleam running on top of it, I'm super Beam-curious now...

[@blackjackjester]

Learn you some erlang for great good

[@LtdJorge]

@@blackjackjester Ferd is the boss. I also recommend his talk The Zen of Erlang. I've watched it like 7 times.

[@RyanIsHoping]

Gleam is awesome!!

[@tedb9602]

Was literally checking your channel for new vids about 5mins ago. Good that I retried

[@pookiepats]

the youtube algo has failed you

[@mritunjaymusale]

Do a video on how android is different from linux i.e building process, distribution, code maintainence, which part of android gets upstreamed to the linux kernel, etc. It could be a main channel or 2nd channel video I guess.

[@universaltoons]

yes pls

[@julesoscar8921]

Basically nothing. Most constructor use their old kernel like 4.x

[@goodness2410]

Fireship, I have been meaning to say this, you are a gift to the programming world. You make programming fun. Thanks for that!

[@smikkelbeer7890]

Right now, I am literally reviewing my university lectures' powerpoint about Erlang and just now thought "hmm maybe fireship has a video on this" and then I see he uploaded this 2 hours ago... There's no way this guy isn't spying on me.

[@mr.alpaca9424]

Great timing, im just getting into elixir. First i knew even less about the beam and erlang now it's a bit more!

[@ErlWithCheese]

1:11 my name is erl. love it.

[@GSBarlev]

I wasn't aware that anyone besides me remembered that show.

[@MarinoFrana]

My wife and me remember, so that makes four of us?

[@sososo3906]

1:17 I love how you made the period red.

[@dstick14]

The syntax seems like what a non programmer would imagine code looks like

[@geroutathat]

Thats the main reason more people dont use it. I thought it was crazy at first but I really admire it after spending proepr time writing code in it.

[@insideTheMirror_]

Just my thought 🤣

[@cycrothelargeplanet]

Fr

[@carlerikkopseng7172]

Found the one who never tried anything outside the C family of languages 😸

[@dstick14]

@@carlerikkopseng7172 well they certainly haven't made it easy to like

[@Mertly]

Thanks for making this. I’ve been learning erlang in university, and I love its elegance. It isn’t meant to be a jack of all trades like some more popular languages, but no language can beat its parallelism at scale.

[@elhaambasheerch7058]

Would love 100 seconds on these: - Turso - Zustand - tailwind v4 - gleam

[@RyanIsHoping]

Gleam seconded!

[@JoaoXii]

This was dandy sir. I'm glad you're opening this topic. I'm a big fan of your content, for its accuracy, concise, motivation starter and also its humour. This could be an opening for actor systems, I used Akka a good while ago, some others may have won the 'race' Microsoft had a good one as well, i think it was for C#

[@Nooobbbyyy]

would love to see miranda or meta language, these are pretty basic but are taught in school at most places to get into function programming. banger video btw as always :)

[@4RILDIGITAL]

Excellent explanation of Erlang, concise and very informative. Found the parts about process isolation and message passing particularly helpful.

[@carpye2774]

I was wondering what people are referring to when talking about Gleam. Thanks!

[@hickscorp]

Woa. I would have never imagined that you'd make a video about the BEAM. You might want to have a look at how BEAM nodes can natively pass messages through process global registries. And hot code reload across nodes! I've used the BEAM professionally for a while now, but much more since Elixir reached 1.2 - that was a long time ago...

[@0e0]

Would love to see a vid about Gleam

[@feelwang]

Pattern matching variable is so elegant and logical that I immensely ❤️

[@rifaldhiaw]

we need gleam for the next video!

[@CaseySEstep]

I REALLY preferred your pacing in this video. It was just a touch slower and made it SO much easier to follow than some of your others

[@bpo217]

I vote for gleam next, seems fitting 😊

[@gtgunar]

Awesome! Not some stackmonkey stuff, but programming language introduction. What Originally started watching the series for. Please do an APL video! THX

[@rofgar]

One other crazy amazing thing is how the deployment works on a live system and calls can be concurrently executed. Previous change do all their execution with old version of code while newly deployed code is already being used for new calls.

[@infty5829]

Great video as always. I think a "100 seconds of UML" would be a great future idea.

[@dilipisharayt]

The moment I've been waiting for!

[@alexnoman1498]

Ah, the prepwork for the Gleam episode tomorrow? :p

[@GK-we4co]

It looks surprisingly elegant when you put it this way...

[@darrennew8211]

The concepts are pretty elegant. The actual details are rather difficult to deal with. No strings, no records, single-assignment without being functional, no explicit time when code gets updated, the weirdness around authentication, and last I looked the documentation was extremely poor if you weren't already immersed in the environment. However, the seamless concurrency, the ability to upgrade running code (including sending functions in messages), the whole "spawn and link" paradigm, all very neat.

[@alexeycherkashin6251]

So cool we have an access to all Erlang sweet parts without necessarity to learn the hard syntax and can utilize Elixir for the purpose

[@muhdiversity7409]

Learn you some Erlang for great good.

[@elixirfun]

Better still, learn Elixir

[@EdKolis]

I remember writing a plugin for Wings 3D, an open source 3D modeling app written in Erlang. One thing that always tripped me up is that the language is purely functional, so all variables are immutable; they can't actually vary!

[@lpil]

Gleam mentioned!!!!

[@0e0]

LETS GO!!!

[@lpil]

@@0e0Hack yeah!!!!!

[@spiritrider963]

I have a cool Eralng pocket knife. It was swag from an Erlang course I went on. I never completed it because I came down with pneumonia on the last day. But they were nice enough to give it to me. Probably written a five lines of Erlang in anger in my career.

[@MohammedAhmed-mr5px]

Bro, the music that you use for these videos sounds like the GTA V online heist missions. Great video as always

[@user-si8ez4xd2f]

I'm in love with Gleam

[@davidjustice8087]

Definitely interested in the language. Syntax is very nice and love the toolset kind of like go.

[@chris-pee]

Unless you really need BEAM, you could just as well use OCaml/ReasonML/Rescript or F#.

[@chudchadanstud]

no thanks. Variables are immutable and it doesn't throw an error when you try to reasign them. It's just another Lang that's gone too deep into Functional programming. It would have been perfect if it was willing to give up some of the fp philosophy for practicality. Otherwise we just have Haskell that looks like Rust running on Beam.

[@LtdJorge]

@@chudchadanstudErlang is immutable too

[@sarun37823]

Did you say Grime? - Señor Cleanfist

[@sjoerd8706]

Erlang and Elixir are amazing ❤

[@raphaelmendesdasilva3858]

Fireship, make some videos about networking technologies. IPv6, HTTP3, anything. I think they would fit well your video format.

[@ardonjr]

agree!

[@Diego-ix8ge]

The Alan Watts meme was brilliant.. as always, your memes are always on point

[@NotGarbageLoops]

Just I start studying it. Seems very useful for low-latency distributed message-passing apps.

[@dankelly]

OMG! "Create a file ending in dot earl" with a pic of Earl from My Name Is Earl... Love it!!

[@krazeemonkee]

⭐️ gleam mentioned!

[@sujezz]

Give us something about gleam and how in practice it is useful vs. some other languages. Like what's the point of gleam when we can do c/c++/rust/go or even js.

[@Dominik-K]

I really love the learnesomeerlangforgreat good book and the whole actor methodology. It's a great paradigm and one day I want to make a programming platform in similar fashion too

[@ClariNerd]

I was waiting for this one

[@williamflores7323]

First Fireship video in months that doesn't make me regret my life choices 😭

[@nesimtunc]

What a “coincidence” I was writing something about Elixir and then this notification arrived 🤩😄 My favorite language!

[@user-qr4jf4tv2x]

oooh bingo let me just put it on my resume

[@davidneal1127]

Never not do resume-driven development. RDD FTW

[@LeviElekes]

Thx 🙏🙏

[@pjcamp-eq1mj]

I missed these kinds of videos

[@shaunkruger]

I really enjoyed my time in erlang around 2009-2011.

[@genericjam9866]

The video concludes with the receive blocks the process which sounds like a fatal flaw until you understand that the BEAM knows to suspend processes that are waiting at a receive block. This is the secret sauce that means the BEAM is almost never blocking. When it receives a message it is 'woken up' to deal with the incoming message. While dormant it only occupies memory so the BEAM can have millions of dormant processes as each one has a very minimal memory footprint (by default - it can grow as needed).

[@andiputraw140]

BEAM is one of the coolest technology as i ever discovered. i should learn its internal sometime in the future along with v8

[@egorsozonov7425]

It’s not. Slow as hell

[@steveoc64]

Re slow performance - later releases of the BEAM runtime now do jit compilation to machine code. Makes hot paths a bit quicker. For performance critical bits - you can call out to C abi shared libs. You can also write functions and resources in Zig, that use the beam engine for allocation and gc. Zig is one of the few languages that will play nice with this, because the whole zig stdlib takes an allocator argument where needed. You just pass it the beam’s allocator. Nice.

[@garythepencil]

thanks, i would like to see a video on the nim programming language

[@husseinkizz]

finally, ship you some erlang!!!

[@lucasgasparino6141]

A video on MPI would be a nice follow-up to this🎉

[@vaakdemandante8772]

Designed in 1986 yet still looks modern in 2024 - damn good design.

[@ramgopal2520]

Erlang is one of the major inspiration for Go.

[@computersciencebyd-m-3323]

Could you make a video on Prolog next? Thank you for your awesome channel.

[@acykablyatley]

another cool part of erlang is its strict use of immutable data structures, and how it uses this to implement its garbage collector

[@apfelingo]

After teasing Prolog, you have to show it to us next!

[@bendertherobot910]

Now, I know Erlang. Thanks!

[@bramvdnheuvel]

Please do Elm in 100 seconds next!

[@stevenpillay6725]

I almost teared up seeing "Hi Mom", don't worry Jeff She is watching! Keep up the good work, I look up to you! May she rest in Peace

[@cycrothelargeplanet]

Wait that's why he writes "Hi mom"

[@stevenpillay6725]

@@cycrothelargeplanet yeah see his community post!

[@user-ee5ge1jo9h]

nice contant, keep it up, I like golang!

[@_MrCode]

Scala in 100 seconds

[@vishaldongre9557]

Scala in 100 seconds

[@sexyolga479]

@@vishaldongre9557 Scala in 100 seconds

[@apr0l]

@@sexyolga479 Scala in 100 seconds

[@artieschmidt3039]

@@sexyolga479 Scala in 100 second

[@__zotahina__]

Scala in 1 minute and 40 seconds

[@WayOfTheCode]

Gleam mentioned lets go

[@amooozk7777]

Errrrrrrlang is so powerful and multi-processing that it made 100s to 163 seconds. Erlang has the power to dilate time. Time dilation 💀

[@BrunoJuliao7]

Wow... I want to see more Erlang! 😇 Maybe a comparison video between Erlang, GLEAM, and Elixir?

[@AnthonyBullard]

Brazil mentioned

[@SkinnyGeek_1010]

We've got a Gleam mention! We really need a Gleam in 100 seconds so we don't scare off folks with the Erlang syntax 😂

[@bodashatta8429]

wow a video about a topic that is not gonna haunt my future

[@guilherme5094]

👍Thanks!

[@xE92vD]

"Erlang mentioned, let's go"

[@wowGusarich]

We’re making it outta concurrency century with this one 🎉

[@krtirtho]

Crazy how this complex multiprocess solution was later replaced by a much better and simple async solution. Always grateful for that

[@carlerikkopseng7172]

What are you talking about 😂 Throwing in async doesn't make an ounce of difference

[@tzvischamovic372]

I do react and typescript like the rest of the world, so anything related, thank you!!

[@user-xi4zn4ly3o]

Good evening sir thank you for sharing this video tutorial and learning today 2:15

[@LouisDuran]

pretty sure I just learned all I need to know about Erlang

[@yearswriter]

This is even more fire than the CUDA one, POG

[@floppa9415]

definitely one of the languages of all time.

[@alishchess]

receiver and after kinda reminds me of Go's channels and select, and reading from the go channel also works, probably Go's creators grubbed it from erling and made it a bit cleaner

[@PratikLawate]

Finally i knw why my dev team needs this in our docker images 😂

[@mykalesalad]

Never heard of her until now, very cool

[@0xruffbuff]

Thx, I never start to learn this language 😄

[@shephusted2714]

do fireship special on samba birth and development: finally a special on things that will take my job - details on a mixture of small shell scripts