BETA is a programming language created at UC Berkeley in the mid-1970s. It was designed to be a more efficient and easier to use alternative to the then-popular ALGOL 68. BETA's most notable feature is its use of pattern matching, which allows programmers to easily and concisely express complex data manipulation operations.
BETA was very influential in the development of subsequent programming languages, most notably Haskell and ML. It is also the basis for the popular programming language Erlang.
Despite its many advantages, BETA was never widely adopted and is now largely forgotten. Nevertheless, it remains an interesting piece of history and a language worth studying for anyone interested in functional programming.