Erlang: The Movie
Why Hacker News recommends it
A beloved classic that HN recommends as the quickest way to see why Erlang is special.
What it is
A short Ericsson film demoing Erlang, showing concurrent processes, debugging tools, and hot code reloading, including crashing parts of a running system while calls continue.
Recommended by 4 HN commenters across 4 different months, 2013 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec lelf · 2013-05 · on “Erlang's Open Telecom Platform (OTP) Framework [video]”
And if you haven't seen it, here is some classic. “Erlang: the Movie”: — [this video] And sequel “Erlang: the Movie II”: — [LINK] Don't think wtf. Just watch.
Recommends mnd · 2017-01 · on “What's all this fuss about Erlang? (2007)”
There’s also “Erlang the Movie”; the designers of Erlang demo some of the qualities of the Erlang system in a delightful way: [this video]
Recommends randomstudent · 2017-08 · on “Elixir in Depth – Reading and personal notes”
The author doesn't talk a lot about preemptive scheduling, which is probably the best thing about the Erlang virtual machine. This video explains what preemptive scheduling is and why it is extremely useful: [LINK] First, the speaker creates an application endpoint that runs into an infinite loop on invalid input. Then, he shows how that doesn't block the rest of the requests. Using native BEAM (EDIT: BEAM = EVM = Erlang Virtual Machine) tools, he looks for the misbehaving process (the one running the infinite loop), prints some debug information and kills it. It's pretty impressive. Another great (and lighter) resource, is "Erlang the Movie" ( [this video] ). It shows the power of concurrency th
Recommends StudentStuff · 2018-09 · on “Ericsson and T-Mobile ink $3.5B deal for 5G”
It is one of the core features of Erlang (a language developed by Ericsson), being able to rewrite code in production, with errors/crashes that break one thread not affecting another. Obligatory link to Erlang: The Movie (10min)- [this video] Note that they start crashing things in Erlang around minute 7, and fix them shortly thereafter. Meanwhile, their setup keeps calls that weren't directly involved in the crash alive and running unaffected.
Cites julienmarie · 2018-04 · on “What Erlang Taught Me About Distributed Systems”
I discovered Erlang in the late 2000s via its kinda weird and iconic video "Erlang the Movie" [this video] that prompted me to dig further. I was at the time an average developer. Erlang, and Joe Armstrong books and videos, made me understand things that other web-oriented languages ( Ruby, PHP... ) never really dug into at the time. Because the Erlang ecosystem is more than distribution. Distribution is a consequence of its design around concurrency and message passing and let-it-crash/auto-healing philosophy. Erlang, and after that Elixir, made me think differently about code and made me a better programmer.
Cites leoc · 2025-11 · on “How I fell in love with Erlang”
It isn't entirely true though. The original Erlang guys made Erlang: The Movie [this video] and the sadly missed Joe Armstong made plenty of blog posts [LINK] and public appearances and expressed a number of strong opinions (though genially) [LINK] . Robert Virding's public profile is not as high, but he's by no means in hiding either. [LINK] — or indeed [LINK] )