Agreed, it's one thing to have good primitives like Go channels but Erlang/Elixir provide an entire system from which to build a concurrent/async application. Things like error handling, messaging, storage, and structuring your application well for concurrency are already basically built-in into the standard approach you take building Erlang/Elixir apps.
* Processes are extremely lightweight, orders of magnitude smaller than operating system processes or JVM threads.
* Exceptions should generally not be handled; instead, those lightweight processes are allowed to fail, and an external supervisor process will re-launch if appropriate.
* Assertions about the state of the data are effectively enabled on every line of code, so the processes crash early, before corrupting other parts of the system.
* Data is immutable, which plays a role in making those assertions happen.
You could probably strip one or two of those bullet points and/or add a couple of more, but I think that captures the highlights.
I'll toot my own horn. If you find that interesting, this is my favorite talk I've given about the above: https://youtu.be/E18shi1qIHU
It’s hardly an afterthought in Erang. It’s a fundamental part of OTP to handle failure. Which is far easier when everything is wrapped in restartable processes with immutable state.
