"let is crash" is critical to the erlang approach. erlang's approach to concurrency fails without it. I recommend reading Joe Armstrong's thesis: http://www.

"let is crash" is critical to the erlang approach. erlang's approach to concurrency fails without it. I recommend reading Joe Armstrong's thesis: http://www.sics.se/~joe/thesis/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf http://www.sics.se/~joe/thesis/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf Your comparison of erlang and node.js is a reasonable exercise. However, I think the most valuable thing to get out of the exercise is that node is not really in competition with erlang. I think its more interesting to look at how node can be used to handle non-blocking http requests (and compare that to rails/django) and write your server code in the same language as your client side code.