One of these was Erlang and it's about as far removed from mainstream languages as you can get. It was designed by Ericsson, the Swedish telecoms company, solely for their needs at the time, about twenty years ago. It's designed for raw information processing; taking an information stream, doing something with it, and sending it somewhere else. What's unique is that it does all this at light speed and, which is becoming more important, concurrently.
All this is well and good and sort of stuck in a small niche part of IT were it not for two things: Erlang went open source a few years ago and hardware is starting to support concurrency, which is causing some headaches with conventional languages.
I went a bit further with it, the point at which my head started to hurt, but I signed on with the Erlang User Group and went to one of their meetings yesterday evening. It was hosted by Erlang Solutions and concerned the use of Erlang at EE (or T-Mobile).
The presenter was Chandru Mullaparthi, Head of Service Development at EE, and was a very down-to-earth speaker. He's been using Erlang for about twelve years and went through the system at EE, highlighting the areas of interest, in particular the anti-fraud features (without giving away anything proprietary). Erlang has allowed him and his team to react very quickly (less than a few days) to any new threats that happen on the EE network, giving them quite a good competitive advantage.
Erlang still looks very niche and so different from conventional languages as to be difficult to justify learning (much less teaching) for the average programmer, but I can imagine it's use spreading, perhaps through the use of Elixir.
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