What role can programming languages play in dealing with concurrency? One answer can be found in Erlang, a language designed for concurrency from the ground up. One of Erlang's key features is its small, yet powerful set of concurrency primitives that help developers reason about the behaviour of concurrent programs. But is it scalable? And how well does it perform? In this article, Jim Larson from Google introduces Erlang and shows how it can be used to implement concurrent programs correctly and quickly.