From what I've heard and seen Erlang is great, but this article doesnt tell me anything about why it is great. Message passing? Come on! You can do message passing in C++, or Python, or any other mainstreem language. Its a matter of convention and system architecture. Its easier to hire developers for a mainstream language, and its probably easier to teach them these conventions then a whole new language + development environment. So, whats all the fuss about Erlang?
PS. I dont mean to be critical about Erlang, I just dont think the article addresses the question in its title.
Well, it all depends on what you mean by message passing. If you mean call a method or a function passing it a value type, then yes you can do message passing in any language.
If on the other hand you mean passing data between completely isolated active entities (processes) that get scheduled for execution independently based on available CPU cores, I/O operations, receiver mailbox size... Then you need an multitasking operating system, which is in fact what the Erlang VM is.
If on the other hand you mean passing data between completely isolated active entities (processes) that get scheduled for execution independently based on available CPU cores, I/O operations, receiver mailbox size...
Or you can use Python multiprocessing on Linux, or Scala actors, or Haskell actors, or Clojure agents...
The short version: apparently you can do this in other languages, but erlang (and possibly other languages) have this concurrency baked-in much better.
p.s. also worth mentioning RabbitMQ on the list of famous erlang projects
PS. I dont mean to be critical about Erlang, I just dont think the article addresses the question in its title.