I read your discussion and really get all the points, and still I just think "don't make me think." The thing with Erlang is, I don't have to care about threads, pointers, libraries, re-entrant code, thread safety etc. I can just write a couple of actors, who do one thing each (in parallel, because Erlang) and they can talk to each other, share some data if they want. The only thing I need to keep in mind is, who has what data (if I need it).

I can hook up to the Erlang runtime (in local, staging, production, wherever) and talk to these actors. I can ask them "hey, what's your state now," "who are you talking to?" Sure, Erlang is slower in some cases, but for the value you get, I think it is priceless in many cases.