Initially composing light-hearted and irreverent works, he also wrote serious, sombre and religious pieces beginning in the 1930s. Erlang is a general-purpose, concurrent, functional programming language. Initially composing light-hearted and irreverent works, he also wrote serious, sombre and religious pieces beginning in the 1930s. It is also a garbage-collected runtime system. In 1989 the building was heavily damaged by fire, but it has since been restored.