I think it's because of the built-in nature of message passing in the language. It's just easier to send around messages to processes. Hot code swapping would be possible with other JITed languages (BEAM isn't a JIT).
Also since erlang has excellent pattern matching (even on binary data!) and a supervisor system (OTP) errors are easy to recover from. Erlang takes a very pragmatic approach of building tools that deal with errors by recovering from them instead of trying to exhaustively trying to prevent them.
Also since erlang has excellent pattern matching (even on binary data!) and a supervisor system (OTP) errors are easy to recover from. Erlang takes a very pragmatic approach of building tools that deal with errors by recovering from them instead of trying to exhaustively trying to prevent them.