The BEAM platform

• Erlang was a language invented by Joe Armstrong at Ericsson
  • Designed specifically to address the problem of distributed systems
  • Uses the BEAM VM for it’s runtime and features
• The BEAM has other programming languages taking advantage of it
  • Elixir
  • Gleam

It all starts with a process

A process?

• Not an OS process
• A very small piece of sequential code
• Elixir is functional in this context, but not pure

Starting a new process

Super high-level overview

Message passing

Quick demo