On YouTube, the commenters say it plays like a Monty Python sketch. One guy even says it in Afrikaans: “Dit lyk vir my baie na ‘n episode van Monty Python.” But another guy jumps in with a caveat. “Much like Monty Python,” he says, “but never intentionally funny.”
It’s known as “Erlang: The Movie,” and you can watch it—all 11 glorious minutes—by clicking on the play button above. Created in 1990 for the—ahem—International Switching Symposium, the video describes the ins and outs of the Erlang programming language, a coding tool that began in the rather arcane world of ’80s telecoms but has recently experienced a renaissance as the the language behind such popular online services as WhatsApp, grindr, and Whisper.
Erlang was invented at Swedish telco Ericsson in 1986, four years before the video was shot, and from the beginning, it was a rather quirky thing—something that certainly comes across in Erlang: The Movie. The film begins with some, yes, Monty Python-esque fanfare, then cuts to the creators of Erlang demonstrating the language through a series of surreal, deadpan phone calls.
It’s impossible to tell if the video is supposed to be funny, but one thing’s for sure: the technology is very serious.
As the video shows, Erlang lets you make changes to an application’s code in real-time without taking the application down. That’s unusual. And it’s because the language was designed for telephone companies that had to provide service massive numbers of simultaneous callers with almost zero downtime. But this approach is also useful for modern web and mobile applications—like WhatsApp and Whisper—which run across data-centers spread across over the world and feed millions of people.
The downside is that Erlang’s syntax is weird—kinda like the movie. That has turned many programmers off over the years. But its advocates say that Erlang is a joy to use once you get the hang of it. And the newer language Elixer, which provides an alternate syntax and additional features, makes it easier to get started.
As for that video, it lives on as a point of geek pride for Erlang programmers—and as fodder for remixers like Boing Boing‘s Dean Putney, who put together a new video using only the phone calls from the original (see below). But we prefer the original.
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