__Introducing Erlang__

Erlang is an old language. The language was first created during the 80's in Ericsson's R&D labs. Its sole purpose has been to make writing highly concurrent, distributed, and fault-tolerant applications easier. For years Erlang has been regarded as a niche language not suited to mainstream development. With multi-core computers commonplace and web applications integrated into most people's daily lives, Erlang is more relevant than ever before.

This talk will:

* Introduce basic Erlang syntax and concepts
* Discuss the actor concurrency model and why it is the best way to write concurrent programs
* Demonstrate Erlang's support for highly-concurrent programs (>10,000+ processes)
* Illustrate Erlang's native support for distributed programming

About the Speaker

Kevin Smith is a software developer at the Ruby-based hosting provider Engine Yard. He's the author of a series of Erlang screencasts, "Erlang in Practice", which illustrate how to use Erlang to accomplish practical development tasks. Kevin has over 15 years of development experience working in a wide variety of industries.