I had the same reaction. This is really not a fair critique of any weaknesses in Erlang or any strengths in Python. In his description of how they implemented maintenance of some global state, this line caught my attention: Our code was not set up this way at all, and it was clearly crippled by being haphazardly implemented in a functional style.
In addition to the statement that they had no Erlang experts currently on staff, it sounds like the people who wrote the system were not Erlang experts either. I wonder if they used OTP to build the system? The post doesn't say, but I'd bet they wrote a lot of their code with erlang's message passing primitives, if they were using messaging at all. This will get hairy and that's why most people should use OTP to build server applications in Erlang.
Lesson learned: you build better systems using languages and frameworks you know vs. using something trendy that you don't understand.
In addition to the statement that they had no Erlang experts currently on staff, it sounds like the people who wrote the system were not Erlang experts either. I wonder if they used OTP to build the system? The post doesn't say, but I'd bet they wrote a lot of their code with erlang's message passing primitives, if they were using messaging at all. This will get hairy and that's why most people should use OTP to build server applications in Erlang.
Lesson learned: you build better systems using languages and frameworks you know vs. using something trendy that you don't understand.