1.1. Why Should I Use Erlang?

What makes Erlang the best choice for your project? It depends on what you are looking to build. If you are looking into writing a number-crunching application, a graphics-intensive system, or client software running on a mobile handset, then sorry, you bought the wrong book. But if your target system is a high-level, concurrent, robust, soft real-time system that will scale in line with demand, make full use of multicore processors, and integrate with components written in other languages, Erlang should be your choice. As Tim Bray, director of Web Technologies at Sun Microsystems, expressed in his keynote at OSCON in July 2008:

If somebody came to me and wanted to pay me a lot of money to build a large scale message handling system that really had to be up all the time, could never afford to go down for years at a time, I would unhesitatingly choose Erlang to build it in.