If you'd like a high-level discussion of why the BEAM was designed as it was, check out my recent post: https://dockyard.com/blog/2018/07/18/all-for-reliability

If you'd like a high-level discussion of why the BEAM was designed as it was, check out my recent post: https://dockyard.com/blog/2018/07/18/all-for-reliability-reflections-on-the-erlang-thesis https://dockyard.com/blog/2018/07/18/all-for-reliability-ref... The TL;DR is: reliability was the main goal, and using isolated processes which can react to each others' failures, even when running on separate machines, was the way they found to get reliability. This turned out to be nice for scalability also.