(1) A unit of measurement of telephone traffic. It is equal to one hour of conversation (3,600 seconds or 36 CCS). Named after the Danish mathematician Agner Krarup Erlang, it also specifies the approximate number of trunks in use; for example, if the traffic in a call center is 8.5 Erlangs in one hour, more than 8 trunks were used in that hour. See
CCS.
(2) An open source functional programming language specialized for concurrent processing (multiprocessing) on Unix and Windows computers. Originally developed by Ericsson and named after A. K. Erlang (see definition #1 above) as well as "Ericsson Language," Erlang makes programming threads easier to write than in traditional languages. Developed in the late 1980s, Erlang was modeled after concurrent languages such as Ada and Modula and functional languages such as ML and Miranda. See
functional programming,
thread and
multithreading.