Erlang is a very cool functional language. It has a funny introductory video that keeps coming up at RailsConf. Mike Clark blogged on it last year but (apparently) a ton of people haven't seen it yet.
Also, there's a Pragmatic Programmer book on the subject of Erlang called Programming Erlang. It's in beta at the moment, but worth checking out.
Why do people care about Erlang? Because it's a functional language, when you code an algorithm it can scale across cores or machines without you having to write threaded code. In the coming world, with it's tons of multi-core machines, this is going to be a very important language trait.
You can read more about Erlang and get a quick intro on D
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