My aversion comes from relatively poor language syntax - it's more verbose than it should be. Lack of powerful type system. And less-than-stellar performance. Out of these, the language is the most annoying.
Can you state which language constructs Erlang has that other languages don't, that are critical to concurrency? Cause it looks like someone built a great VM and cluster library, then tossed in a language for fun.
And please explain why Erlang's features are not possible in other languages. Not just unavailable at the moment. Or do you mean the guarantees are different? As in other languages will let you have corrupted shared state? (I view that as a positive; let me escape guarantees when I want too.)
Or perhaps point me to a decent intro that'd cover all this? I looked at it before and didn't get the real point why we need Erlang the language or why in theory, you can't have OTP with the CLR or JVM.
Syntax does not matter much; Erlang's focus is not to be a good general-purpose language. It is good for distributed computing because it lacks many useful and pleasant features.
Erlang has built-in immutability done right (more so than in Scala, OCaml, Clojure(?)) - if it's not built in the language from the start, there's nothing you can do about it.
Erlang has built-in binary serialization/deserialization that makes messages across network easy and natural. Please show me a language that can serialize a closure and send it over network. A rich type system and general-purpose language features are obstacles here, types of values have to be dumb to serialize seamlessly.
Other than that, it has a lot of convenient and coherent features like good pattern-matching (useful for parsing and routing messages), proper tail-call optimization (just look at Scala, again), the built-in actor model, lightweight processes, process monitoring, the large library of battle-tested distributed practices, OTP, – these things can be recreated in another language/VM, but it will probably take huge resources and efforts and self-limitation of the platform, not features.
Can you state which language constructs Erlang has that other languages don't, that are critical to concurrency? Cause it looks like someone built a great VM and cluster library, then tossed in a language for fun.
And please explain why Erlang's features are not possible in other languages. Not just unavailable at the moment. Or do you mean the guarantees are different? As in other languages will let you have corrupted shared state? (I view that as a positive; let me escape guarantees when I want too.)
Or perhaps point me to a decent intro that'd cover all this? I looked at it before and didn't get the real point why we need Erlang the language or why in theory, you can't have OTP with the CLR or JVM.