"If you can assert that after loading new code from a file, ..." You are arguing about technical details, and I am arguing about architecture. The only way you

"If you can assert that after loading new code from a file, ..." You are arguing about technical details, and I am arguing about architecture. The only way you will agree with me is if you zoom out a bit, and look at it from the developer's point of view: * To deploy a bugfix, did the developer have to take the system down for maintenance and/or interrupt service? The answer for both PHP and erlang is "no". * Does a runtime exception/crash bring down a large part of the system, or is it isolated as much as possible (often to a single request)? The answer for both PHP and erlang is the latter. Those are two of the biggest claims erlang can make, and PHP can make them, too. Either the erlang community has a lot of difficulty communicating the advantages, or they aren't quite as unique any more (though perhaps they were at one time). Now, erlang does have it's place. It's great for handling arbitrary protocols and getting a reliable, performant network daemon going quickly[1]. The binary pattern matching is awesome. The erlang shell allows you to have a point of entry to find out what's going on in a system while it's running. Really awesome stuff. [1] I wrote one such daemon, replacing a bunch of python and finding a lot of bugs in the original along the way. The erlang version was about 50% as many lines of code, even though I wrote out all the typespecs and had to reimplement some things that the python version got for free. But the service was tiny, so you're right, I'm not an erlang expert.