Applications

Many topics surrounding Erlang/Elixir and OTP require us to be careful about our verbiage. We discussed before the difference between Erlang processes and OS processes. Similarly, we need to be careful about applications.

Outside of OTP, application is a very general term and we toss it around without much care. "There's an app for that," comes to mind often. In this less specific and constrained perspective, applications are general, not necessarily single purpose, programs that perform things for us. We have seen many different forms of applications take form over the years—desktop applications, web applications, and now mobile applications. For desktop applications, we can think of our word processors, web browsers, text editors, IDEs, games, and so on. For web applications, we can think of our social media sites, task tracking applications, games, office suites, and so on. The mobile app space contains similar applications to those already listed. The applications are mostly...