Erlang (programming language) Erlang is a general-purpose concurrent programming language and runtime system. The sequential subset of Erlang is a functional language, with strict evaluation, single assignment, and dynamic typing. It was designed by Ericsson to support distributed, fault-tolerant, soft-real-time, non-stop applications. The post-install script will add some files to the /usr/lib/erlang directory, at it does not seem to be possible to create these files when the package is created. Therefore, if you uninstall this package, be sure to remove the /usr/lib/erlang/ directory afterward.