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Erlang is a functional, general-purpose language oriented towards building scalable, concurrent systems with high availability guarantees. It was built at the end of the 1980s at Ericsson for handling telephone switches.
Erlang is a programming language used to build massively scalable soft real-time systems with requirements on high availability. Some of its uses are in telecoms, banking, e-commerce, computer telephony and instant messaging.
Advertisements. Funs are used to define anonymous functions in Erlang.
It was originally proprietary software within Ericsson, developed by Joe Armstrong, Robert Virding, and Mike Williams in 1986, but was released as free and open-source software in 1998. Erlang/OTP is supported and maintained by the Open Telecom Platform (OTP) product unit at Ericsson.
Functional languages of the kind you describe are general purpose programming languages, they're used for all manner of things, including web apps and business apps. (I use Haskell).
As gabor implies, ultimately it comes down to libraries. Scala has a web framework: lift. Haskell has happstack, as well as 2100 4400 (in 2010 2012) libraries on Hackage for all manner of thiings.
It really isn't so much a question of the language, as the toolchain, when considering particular specialized domains.
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Functional languages are good for anything you would like to use them for.
However, developing applications these days are not as simple as using a programming language. The advantage of Java, C#, etc. is that they come with large libraries and other environment niceties that are absolutely required when you build business software. Most functional languages do not have that great support (as yet?).
F# might be promising since it's in the .NET environment and can take advantage of the tools available there (correct me if I'm wrong).
This article describes how Lisp, an early functional language, was used to create a web based application successfully.
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