By "designed from scratch", he/she probably means that Erlang's asynchrony is thoroughly integrated, while node.js tries to retrofit such a model onto JS, and s

By "designed from scratch", he/she probably means that Erlang's asynchrony is thoroughly integrated, while node.js tries to retrofit such a model onto JS, and still has operations that will cause the whole system to block. It stopped mattering that Erlang evolved from a Prolog prototype when it ceased running on top of SICStus's IO primitives. (FWIW, Prolog is a really cool language, particularly for prototyping. Event-driven, IO-heavy stuff is just not its strong point. The pattern matching stuff in Erlang comes straight from Prolog, though.)