Erlang is a functional language, designed for systems that cannot scale and that are highly parallelized. Why has interest in Erlang risen in the last few years, and why are people using a language that explicitly avoids state, objects, and threads in favor of functional techniques and processes? In this talk, Steven Proctor introduces Erlang, describing why it works the way it does, and how you can use it for better, faster, and more reliable software systems.