Yahoo is no stranger to functional programming languages. It has had significant products in languages like Lisp and Scheme. Somehow Erlang, and other function languages, are often overlooked when most developers are researching various problems and systems. This is very unfortunate given the power and flexibility that these languages provide. At Yahoo there are places where functional languages and make a phenomenal difference in the way problems and solutions are approached. This presentation will cover how Erlang, a powerful and flexible functional language, gave us exactly what we needed at a critical time and how it was approached as a production language at Yahoo.About Bay Area Functional Programmers: BayFP meets monthly with talks on functional programming. Slides and videos from previous talks are available at http://bayfp.org/blog/. The group mailing list is http://groups.google.com/group/bayfp/. Less