What exactly is Erlang/OTP?

Question

I cannot find a clear definition of what Erlang/OTP is and what purpose does it serve. Can anyone give a brief introduction to what it is and what it does?

On erlang/otp, it says

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 telecom, banking, e-commerce, computer telephony and instant messaging. Erlang's runtime system has built-in support for concurrency, distribution and fault tolerance.

OTP is set of Erlang libraries and design principles providing middle-ware to develop these systems. It includes its own distributed database, applications to interface towards other languages, debugging and release handling tools.

Answer 1

You actually have your answer in the question

First Erlang is a programming language, Examples of other programming languages

• Go
• Python
• Ruby

A programming language is a special language programmers use to develop applications, scripts, or other set of instructions for computers to execute.

Second OTP is a set of tools and libraries the one can use when building applications written in erlang

In programming, a library is a collection of already compiled code that a programmer can use in his program. Libraries are particularly useful for storing frequently used code.

• Python has the Python Standard Library
• Ruby has the Ruby Standard Library

Now OTP stands for Open Telecom Platform, While this is strange name to call a set of libraries, this name most due to the fact that the Erlang programming language was designed at the Ericsson Computer Science Laboratory. So OTP is the name of the erlang standard library, so while the name contains the term telecom the library is not about telecom anymore