Inside Erlang – creator Joe Armstrong tells his story

Armstrong designed Erlang with the aim of improving the development of telephony applications by creating a language better tailored to its needs. The initial version of Erlang was influenced by the programming language PLEX – used in earlier Ericsson exchanges – and was implemented in Prolog. “We wanted to tailor a program language for telecom systems and the results became this programming language that we now know as Erlang,” Armstrong said.

Source: wcm.ericsson.net