Another key to Erlang's success here is the ports system. Basically "external" resources have a defined cleanup mechanism even if the process that created them

Another key to Erlang's success here is the ports system. Basically "external" resources have a defined cleanup mechanism even if the process that created them dies. An open socket under the hood has its own thread it can use to clean up. With effort you can do this with your own things too through the linking mechanism, having some process watch another process using your resources and then have an execution thread that can clean up if the user spontaneously dies. Some of it too is just Erlang being too, err, for lack of a better word "weak" to have some of the problematic resources. Since Erlang has no "locks", you simply can't take a lock and then kill the thread responsible for unlocking it. You can construct such locks at a higher level, but Erlang's design tends to encourage other designs. For instance, if I were designing a higher-level lock, I'd design it to link to the process taking the lock and release it if it dies. This can still theoretically get you into trouble but especially if this is documented as the semantics of the lock, you have to work a lot harder at it. If you really worked at it you could manage to screw up your Erlang system with thread killing through your own lock implementation and such, but it still will be something you can recover from the REPL, you won't confuse BEAM itself. In an imperative language you'd be ranging from lucky to be able to reach in somehow and fix it to there simply being no way.