Erlang on the JVM as anything more than a toy is fundamentally misunderstanding Erlang -- which basically reinforces the article's central thesis. The article mentions the need for lightweight concurrency support to be baked into the platform -- the Erlang VM is the epitome of this. Idiomatic Erlang spawns a large number of isolated, concurrent processes, and lets them crash when things go wrong, with supervision trees to recover and restart processing. If a single JVM thread crashes, the whole VM goes. Additionally, you also lose secondary benefits such as per-process heaps/GC, etc. These things are impossible to cleanly graft on to the JVM.