The BEAM provides an unmatched concurrency model and related infrastructure. Targeting a language at it gets you all the benefits of that language plus all of t

The BEAM provides an unmatched concurrency model and related infrastructure. Targeting a language at it gets you all the benefits of that language plus all of the fundamental work done to build distributed systems. Another way of looking at it: almost nothing that is important or wonderful about writing Erlang is the language itself. Most of what people rave about is the BEAM. This means you can fairly easily throw out the language and use a different one and get all the benefit. Now that I'm thinking about it - that last point is a spectacular achievement of design and abstraction.