Starting a colum about Erlang is welcome and a must at the time the software industry is indeed lacking sound and powerful development frameworks to address the full potential of multiple-core multiple-CPU computers. Erlang is a full blown "pure" functional programming language strongly oriented towards concurrent programming. Apart from the powerful and very expressive clause-oriented syntactic constructs used to define functions, Erlang retains nothing from the declarative aspects usually associated with the family of logic programming languages ; there is no backtacking mechanism, nor unification operator. Indeed, Erlang native and powerful "match" operator is best described as a "binding" operator (tree-binding) that Lisp lovers have long known as the "let" construct. There is no set, setq, or equivalent, and therefore no assignment operator per se : once bound, the value of an Erlang variable cannot be changed. Along with message passing, this is precisely what makes Erlang so safe and easy to use for concurrent programming (ok, once the programmer has forgotten about idiosyncratic iterative constructs and acquainted himself with the more robust functional approach) : no shared memory, no shared state, and therefore no need for lock or semaphone. Sort of parallel programming made easy ! As emphasized by Douglas, despite its roots in Telecom, Erlang should be seen as a general programming language and a platform of choice for today's concurrent programming. My feeling is that wide and successful Erlang adoption lies first of all in helping developpers to realize how easy the shift from iterative programming (OO or not) to functional programming. Franck PORCHER, Ph.D. fporcher@smartech.pf »