I think it's because of the built-in nature of message passing in the language. It's just easier to send around messages to processes. Hot code swapping would b

I think it's because of the built-in nature of message passing in the language. It's just easier to send around messages to processes. Hot code swapping would be possible with other JITed languages (BEAM isn't a JIT). Also since erlang has excellent pattern matching (even on binary data!) and a supervisor system (OTP) errors are easy to recover from. Erlang takes a very pragmatic approach of building tools that deal with errors by recovering from them instead of trying to exhaustively trying to prevent them.