Sure you CAN, but Erlang/Elixir makes it really, really easy. The primary purpose of a programming language is establish pretty paths to solve problems. When yo

Sure you CAN, but Erlang/Elixir makes it really, really easy. The primary purpose of a programming language is establish pretty paths to solve problems. When you're fighting those pretty paths, your code gets bogged down with cruft and workarounds. When you're writing code with the pretty path, your code becomes clean, elegant, and painless. To use a specific example, look at establishing independent processes that communicate through message passing. In Erlang/Elixir, it's trivial. 2 callback implementations and you've got yourself a GenServer running independently and expecting messages. A quick function to wrap the message call, and boom, you're off to the races. You want supervision? Bam, 2 short lines of code. If you try to do that in, say, Python, you'll be bogged down by a language structure that is, by design, encouraging of serial code.