BEAM is the virtual machine at the core of the Erlang Open Telecom Platform (OTP).
[1] BEAM is part of the Erlang Run-Time System (ERTS), which compiles Erlang source code into bytecode, which is then executed on the BEAM.
[4] Originally BEAM was short for Bogdan's Erlang Abstract Machine, named after Bogumil "Bogdan" Hausman, who wrote the original version, but the name may also be referred to as Björn's Erlang Abstract Machine, after Björn Gustavsson, who wrote and maintains the current version.
[7][8] The predecessor of the BEAM was JAM (Joe's Abstract Machine), which was the first virtual machine for the Erlang language and was written by Joe Armstrong.
The most popular of these is Elixir, which had more responses than Erlang itself in a 2023 Stack Overflow developer survey.